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

  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, and AOL placed a full-age ad in the New York Times about SOPA. And there was a crack in the armor of the Democratic Party establishment, which had been largely supportive of the bill: responding to the day of protests, Nancy Pelosi tweeted her opposition to SOPA.

  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 listserv where activists undertook most of their coordination up to date on the latest legislative events. FFTF and its allies kicked into even higher gear, seeking to expand the number of participating websites.

  WHO’S CRAZY NOW?

  AARON SWARTZ

  There was probably a year or so of delay. And, in retrospect, we used the time to lay the groundwork for what came later. But that’s not what it felt like at the time. At the time, it felt like we were going around telling people we thought these bills were awful and, in return, they thought we were crazy. I mean, kids wandering around waving their arms about how the government is going to censor the Internet? It sounds crazy.

  You can ask my friends. I was constantly telling them about what was going on, trying to get them involved, and I’m pretty sure they just thought I was exaggerating. Even I began to doubt myself! I started wondering: was this really that big a deal? Why should I expect anyone to care? It was a tough period.

  But when the bill came back and started moving again, it all started coming together. All the folks we had talked to suddenly began really getting involved—and getting others involved. Everything started snowballing.

  It happened so fast. I remember one week, I was having dinner with a fellow in the technology industry. He asked what I worked on and I told him about this bill.

  “Wow,” he said. “You need to tell people about that.”

  I groaned.

  And then, just a few weeks later, I was chatting with this cute girl on the subway. She wasn’t involved in the technology industry, but when she heard that I was she turned to me, very seriously, and said “You know, we have to stop SOAP.”

  Progress.

  But that’s illustrative of what happened during those couple weeks. Because the reason we won wasn’t because I worked to stop SOPA or reddit did or Google or Tumblr or anyone else. It was because there was this enormous mental shift. It was suddenly everyone’s responsibility. Everyone was thinking of ways they could help—often clever, ingenious ways. They made videos and infographics and started PACs and designed ads and bought billboards and wrote news stories and held meetings. Everyone wanted to help.

  I remember at one point during this period, I helped organize a meeting of startups in New York, trying to encourage everyone to get involved in doing their part. And I tried a trick that I heard Bill Clinton used to fund his foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative. I turned to every startup founder in the room in turn and said “What are you going to do?”—and they all wanted to one-up each other.

  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.

  It became a popular refrain for SOPA/PIPA protestors to suggest “It’s no longer OK to NOT know how the Internet works.” See the protest signs above from the Jan. 18,2012 NY Tech Meetup.

  I remember when that moment first hit me. I was at an event and I got introduced to a U.S. senator—one of the strong proponents of the original COICA bill. And I asked him why, despite being such a progressive, despite giving a speech in favor of civil liberties, he was supporting a bill that would censor the Internet.

  And the typical politician’s smile faded from his face and his eyes started burning a fiery red. And he started shouting. Something like, “Those people on the Internet!” He yelled, “They think they can get away with anything! They think they can just put anything up and there’s nothing we can do to stop them! They put up everything! They put up the plans to our fighter jets and they just laugh at us! Well, we’re going to show them. There’s got to be laws on the Internet—it’s got to be under control.”

  Now, as far as I know, no one has ever put the plans to U.S. fighter jets up on the Internet. I mean, that’s just not something I’ve heard about. And there’s absolutely no way whatsoever that COICA, PIPA, or SOPA would’ve addressed that issue: it’s simply not what the bills were constructed to do—even a cursory reading of them makes that evident. But that’s sort of the point. It wasn’t a rational consideration—it was an irrational fear that things were out of control. Here was this man, a United States senator! And those people on the Internet? They were just mocking him. They had to be brought under control. Things had to be under control.

  That was the attitude of Congress. And just as seeing that fire in the senators’ eyes scared me, I think it scared a lot of people. This wasn’t the attitude of a thoughtful government trying to resolve tradeoffs in order to best represent its citizens. This was the attitude of a tyrant.

  And the citizens fought back.

  NEARING THE POINT OF NO RETURN

  DAVID SEGAL

  As a former legislator, I see a committee vote as a key choke point—and typically a point of no return: if a bill makes it through committee it typically means that it has the backing of legislative leadership and that it’s greased and ready to go before the full floor for a final vote, where, for having leadership’s backing, it’s pretty certain to pass. Floor votes are theater. If it fails to make it through committee after an earnest push, it’s likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

  To most of the public, a mid-December committee vote is but a form of legislative arcana that’s much less interesting than getting blissful on egg nog. It’s much easier to rally people to take action in front of a floor vote, even though the outcome of such votes is almost always pre-ordained and quite unlikely to be influenced by public pressure.

  There was a standing sense that we needed to pull together another meeting of Internet and activist big wigs to try to mobilize more people for the next round of the fight, whenever that might be. I worked hard to convince as many people as possible that it was RIGHT NOW, before the scheduled “markup” of SOPA in the House Judiciary Committee.

  A core group of us—Holmes and Tiffiniy at FFTF, Elizabeth Stark, Brad Burnham, and Aaron and I—began to organize in New York. (The Silicon Alley folks, for whatever reasons, got mobilized in opposition to SOPA far faster than the West Coast.)

  Brad leaned on his portfolio companies to participate, and with that came a scatter shot of some of the moment’s most influential social media startups, and a home base for the meeting: Tumblr’s hipster-chic offices in lower Manhattan.

  We asked Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren to open the call, and she quickly accepted: her gravitas would help draw people in, and she would be able to walk us through the nuts-and-bolts of the markup process. And the techies whom we were hoping would participate would be impressed by her savvy about issues that many of
them seemed to assume every last member of Congress was completely ignorant of. (A handful of them actually know a thing or two, and several others are at least aware, and willing to admit, that they don’t know much.)

  Millions of people had already joined forces to fight SOPA and PIPA—but that work had overwhelmingly taken part in the virtual space. For me a “meeting” used to mean a face-to-face encounter around a bulky wooded table at the State House or City Hall; now it meant any of dozens of conference calls that took place two or three times a day with people whom I’d never met in real life.

  Part of me longed for more real, in-person negotiation and collaboration, and the Tumblr meeting served that purpose and has remained an important marker when I look back on organizing efforts of last fall and winter. Nearly one hundred people participated, about half of them in person and half on the phones, from throughout the country. Participants ranged from reddit and Tumblr employees to progressive MoveOn organizers to libertarian wonks at Cato, and the meeting provided me with the sense that this was coalescing into a real movement. We were now a team that actually identified as such, with a clear, unified purpose at hand. The mood was upbeat, with a newfound sense that we could win this fight, and the Holiday spirit was in the air: reddit’s Alexis Ohanian showed up in costume, just back from a flashmob of Santas.

  Lofgren implored us to turn up the volume of emails and phone calls—the notion that we should “melt the phones” on Capitol Hill was ubiquitous, but I can’t recall whether or not she uttered that precise phrase. We immediately started brainstorming new sites and tools that we could use to make that happen. Demand Progress and Fight for the Future (who generally had access to a more robust tech team than we did) launched a refresh of several sites and conspired on activism tools, the most novel of which (FFTF’s brainstorm) allowed users to “self-censor” posts to Facebook. Their friends would need to email Congress in opposition to SOPA in order to read the text beneath the redaction.

  These screenshots show examples of Fight for the Future’s self-censorship tools in use.

  At this point we’d been posting updates about COICA, PIPA, and SOPA to the websites FireDogLake and DailyKos for well over a year as part of my attempt to rally the Left in opposition; we did the same now, with the sense that people were finally attuned to the cause, and invested in winning it. Here’s one version of an exhilarated summary of the Tumblr meeting we posted to such sites and several listservs that weekend, which outlines the game plan we’d concocted to support our allies like Lofgren as they carried our water through the markup.

  ACTION NEEDED THIS WEEK: JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT (SEE BELOW)–PLEASE FORWARD THIS, POST TO LISTS, BLOGS, ETC.

  Please email David Segal at David@DemandProgress.org if you want to receive direct updates as action pages and tools go live

  This Saturday, more than seventy representatives from leading tech companies and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum participated in a meeting to coordinate action against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The meeting, which included leaders from Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and reddit was remarkable for the array of participating organizations and its focus on how to mobilize to inspire millions of Americans to take action to tell Congress that this bill is deeply flawed.

  Representative Zoe Lofgren opened the meeting with an overview of the current state of the legislation, emphasizing the need for Americans to call their representatives EARLY THIS WEEK to voice their strong discontent with the bill: It is slated for a vote in the House Judiciary Committee on THURSDAY.

  Please read the below to find out how you can get involved. If we’re going to beat SOPA—and future bills like it—we must expand the network of involvement fast …

  Action Plan: 12/15 House Judiciary SOPA Markup

  The most important thing to know:

  We have the best chance of making a difference on this bill if we can push hundreds of thousands of calls into the House of Representatives Monday through Thursday. This is because it’s crucial our voices are heard BEFORE the bill enters the markup (voting) stage in the House Judiciary committee.

  Here’s what you can do:

  1) Use whatever means necessary to drive users to our central portal—FightForTheFuture.org—where people will be prompted to call their House representative and given the tools to know what to say and how to say it.

  2) Spread our censorship tools—please visit AmericanCensorship.org to find a tool that lets anyone redact portions of a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, etc. The redaction will be a link back to the AmericanCensorship. org page to drive calls.

  3) Drive people to IWorkforTheInternet.org to post pictures of themselves to tell the world that the Internet is an engine of jobs growth in this country.

  4) Develop your own tools to drive calls to the U.S. House of Representatives (calls to the Senate are not a priority this week)—please let us know if you need any assistance with scripts or other materials to support these tools.

  5) Forward this email to anybody and everybody who is in a position to help (sites that might participate, activist orgs, reporters and bloggers, etc)

  FACT SHEET ABOUT THE LEGISLATION (SOPA)

  SOPA’s provisions would directly:

  1) Undermine the DMCA safe harbor by forcing sites to start policing usergenerated content BEFORE it gets uploaded, or risk being shut down for facilitating infringement.

  2) Give the government new powers to block Americans’ access to domains that are accused of facilitating copyright infringement.

  3) Ban others from linking back to said sites, and ban search engines from listing them in the indexes.

  4) Make it a felony for people to upload unlicensed content, punishable by five years in prison. (Think background music, cover bands, karaoke vids, etc.)

  The consequences we predict are that SOPA will:

  1) Kill existing and prospective jobs; 2) Stifle innovation; 3) Undermine web security—more on that in this letter from Sandia National Lab; 4) Allow our government to engage in new forms of censorship; 5) Give comfort (and know-how) to regimes abroad that are seeking to use censorship to stymie democracy and political unrest.

  Thanks so much for taking on this fight—we can absolutely still win if we keep working together and mobilize our membership and user bases like never before. It’ll go down in history, and leave a lasting infrastructure that we can use to fight back against future attacks on the web. If you want some quick inspiration and a sense of how far we’ve come, check out this great Slate piece on the rise of the “Geek Lobby.”

  The Markup

  The markup (described below in more detail by Patrick Ruffini) probably was indeed the point of no return for the bill—despite the tremendous happenings that were yet to come. We had a singular mission throughout: to keep bombarding Congress with calls and emails until the markup ended, driven by email alerts to the Demand Progress and Fight for the Future email lists, each now on the order of seven hundred fifty thousand people strong, whom we steered to the American Censorship landing page. Several sites that had participated in the meeting at Tumblr, and many others, urged their users to participate too. We expected the effort to be a one-day endeavor, but as Patrick explains, it became much more complicated than that as Lamar Smith dropped his reins and utterly lost control of his committee—Republicans and Democrats alike.

  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 have been 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.

  The growing consternation put other politicians in compromising positions, and they took notice of the striking doings before the House Judiciary Committee. California Senator Dianne Feinstein went home for the holidays with the (perhaps naive) hope of brokering a ceasefire in the civil war that was brewing between her state’s North (Silicon Valley) and South (Hollywood). Tech titans expressed that they were more than happy to meet—any indication that their concerns were being taken seriously representing clear evidence that their standing was improving. However, when she sought the presence of Hollywood, via a communiqué to Disney President Bob Iger, he made it clear that he and his associates sure weren’t going to waste their time meeting with that measly senior senator from the nation’s most populous state: they’d done more than enough talking already, and had their votes sewn up.

  It’s important to remember not to stare directly at the sparks that fly when egos this large collide. But even were their stances equally righteous, it’d be hard not to preference the will of an elected official who’s third only to the president and vice president in the size of her constituency, rather than an over-paid peddler of Hollywood schlock—who’s overseen the ruination of the Muppets franchise, and now holds Star Wars in his clutches.

  Feinstein would shift from oblivious supporter of PIPA to ambivalent, to moderately opposed, and eventually asked Harry Reid to postpone action on the legislation. We made sure that legislative staff was put on notice, as the Huffington Post reported.