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

  THEN, THE BLACKOUT

  TIFFINIY CHENG

  On January 18, 2012 Word Press placed images of censored blogs all over its home page. Meanwhile, Craigslist placed a tirade against SOPA/PIPA on its homepage.

  We’d all made a ton of progress, but there was still a sturdy wind at our backs and it made sense to keep pressing forward and make sure the bill was really done-for. EFF, FFTF, Public Knowledge, Mozilla, Demand Progress, CDT and several other organizations and platforms got to work on building towards another day of action. Mozilla helped connect us to WordPress—a top 30 site—and we got a commitment from them that they’d participate. We heard that Craigslist—a top ten site—wanted to get involved.

  The Wikipedia community got closer and closer to approving a site-wide blackout on U.S. Wikipedia, with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales going public about his position in support of a SOPA protest: more and more people understood that SOPA would’ve been narrowly destructive of Wikipedia, but also would have undermined other efforts to use the Internet to broaden access to information. (One of the most extraordinary artifacts from the blackout would be the stream of tweets from jilted middle and high school students whose lack of access to the site stymied schoolwork for a day and provided a fleeting glimpse of what life was like in the prehistoric 1990s.)

  Activists around the nation held protests on January 18, 2012. The photo above shows the anti-SOPA/PIPA protest in San Francisco, CA.

  Even as these major pieces began to shift into place, Congress continued to suffer a baseline bombardment of constituent contacts via phones and emails—and, for the first time, Twitter was playing a critical role in impacting a legislative endeavor in the United States. Tweets were especially useful because lawmakers’ handlers could see them right away and Twitter was built to spur virality, since a tweeter’s friends would see the message to Congress—educating others to the danger of the bill, and spinning off waves of additional tweets from the given social network. Tweets from celebrities were especially encouraging, as several courageous musicians and actors bucked their paymasters and stood up for the Internet—and, in doing so, their fan bases.

  We launched SOPAStrike.com to serve as a hub for the new wave of organizing. Countless websites popped up in support of the effort, and coders and designers from all over the web developed a wide array of plugins, widgets, badges, twitter avatar badges, and countless other ways for people to get in on the action.

  Taking advantage of the January recess when members of Congress were in their home states, FFTF and Public Knowledge organized in-person meetings in most states on my.americancensorship.org and Meetup, and myriad Americans showed up at at least fifty town halls and peppered their lawmakers with questions about the bill. They were generally quite polite, but perhaps they took a little inspiration from the Tea Party’s success at doing the same during the Health Care fight.

  On January 14, the Obama administration published an iconic blog post opposing SOPA/PIPA, and ever more members of Congress start to come out against the two bills, citing meetings with constituents. The blackout was still days away, but things were already snowballing out of control.

  Ultimately, more than one hundred fifteen thousand sites pledged to blackout their sites or prominently display the FFTF widget for 24 hours. This included four of America’s top ten sites by traffic—Craigslist, Wikipedia, Google, and eBay—and 13 top 100 sites. Wordpress (used by over 16% of the top million websites) and Wikipedia blacked out entirely, as did reddit and Craigslist (which to date maintains a victory link on every housing, job, and “for sale” search result). Other major sites like Google, Amazon, Pinterest, and Flickr blocked out their logos and/or displayed links to take public action. The quantity and quality of press coverage was unprecedented for any concern even remotely connected to online freedoms, with the campaign earning worldwide press and extensive front page, above-the-fold coverage in virtually every American daily paper. There were over three million tweets and the “SOPA and PIPA bills,” “piracy,” “censorship,” and “blackout” were among the top ten trending search terms on Google.

  Washington and Hollywood insiders didn’t know what was coming, but on the morning the blackout began, it was clear that the fight against SOPA and PIPA was destined to be a watershed moment in the history of the Internet, and even in political history. There were over one billion impressions of the anti-SOPA messaging, with more than twenty-four million people taking action in the form of emails, phone calls, and signing petitions—millions each from Google and Wikipedia alone. The protests moved offline too: thousands protested outside senators’ offices in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and D.C. In the end, dozens of lawmakers who’d backed the bills, including several cosponsors, publicly withdrew their support. OpenCongress.org, the Congressional transparency website, organized a collaborative whip count project, and on the day of the blackout you could watch lawmakers’ support for the bill crumble in real time as you refreshed the page.

  The end result: both bills—both seen as unbeatable just months before—were shelved indefinitely. The New York Times described the flabbergasted reaction of the MPAA’s Chris Dodd, who’d become Hollywood’s top lobbyist immediately after ending his decades-long career in the Senate. The ferocity of the movement was a wakeup call to Washington, signaling, that:

  … no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism. “This is altogether a new effect,” Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing “an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically” in the last four decades, he added.

  Within days of the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, momentum from this global online uprising helped inspire scores of street protests across Europe against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a measure that has been coined “Europe’s SOPA.” The international treaty would have infringed upon online freedoms in service of cracking down on supposed intellectual property violations. Poland was even in the unfortunate position of having announced its support for the agreement on the same day as the blackout, and became fast fodder for protests. The synergies between the anti-SOPA protests and the anti-ACTA organizing created an additive effect that scared the bejesus out of European lawmakers and compelled many jurisdictions that had announced their support for ACTA—or whose executives had even formally signed it—to decline to ratify it or actively announce their opposition. The resounding defeat of this trade agreement by the European Parliament in July 2012—on a 478-39 vote—was directly attributed to the emergence of Internet users as a powerful force in shaping policy.

  And while our domestic opponents have written off our success as a onetime phenomenon, the Internet freedom constituency earned another big legislative win shortly thereafter: as of this writing, the civil liberties grassroots groups had helped to stall out the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act ( CISPA). CISPA began making its way through Congress in early 2012, passing the House in April 2012. The bill, which was ostensibly intended to prevent threats to cybersecurity, was written so broadly that it could easily be used for government spying and censorship. FFTF helped organize in-person meetings with senators and created doyouhaveasecret.org, a site that drove thousands of emails and phone calls to Congress.

  Our opponents will no doubt be back with similar laws in different packaging. A genuinely open Internet is simply too much of a threat to powerful, establishment forces. Anticipating this, FFTF is now working to transform the ad hoc coalition that formed around SOPA into a stable, self-sustaining force capable of stopping future bad tech legislation. FFTF has already begun setting up an emergency alert system for the Internet—the Internet Defense League—that is designed to take the tactics that killed SOPA and PIPA and turn them into a permanent force for defending the Internet and making it better. Early members of the league include Mozilla, Wordpress, reddit, OpenCongress, and hundred
s of other websites of all sizes that will be ready to leap into action as soon as a threat arises. Beyond this, the fight against SOPA and PIPA has built a massive new constituency of Internet users who now better understand the threats that Congress, the content industry, and other powerful actors pose to their networks. Most importantly, we’re ever-more astute activists—and now we know what winning tastes like.

  CONGRESS SAYS: “THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING”

  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.

  Some of these offices—like Ron Paul’s—were congratulatory. Others, particularly those that were complicit in attempting to foist SOPA on the American public, were a bit less gracious.

  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. We’d run several anti-SOPA and PIPA actions, first urging lawmakers to decline to cosponsor the bill, then urging them to take action to oppose it, and so on. Thousands of new people participated in each successive action, and many of the bills’ most adamant opponents became repeat offenders.

  Each contact we generated included a name, email address, and street address—not terribly difficult for a Congressional office to corroborate. Even so, here’s the email we received from Quigley’s office after we forwarded along the notes our members had generated:

  Thank you for this information; it is useful. However, because many of the names are repeated, but with slightly different messages, it appears as though these addresses and messages were fabricated. Perhaps you could explain how these messages were created. Providing more legitimate constitute letters would make taking this information into account more acceptable to our office.

  Consider that for a moment: a Congress so insulated from its constituencies, a so-called Republic in which public participation is so depressed, that a substantial number of its lawmakers—including a robust bipartisan cadre in the Senate—even pursue as a priority fiercely unpopular Internet censorship legislation to begin with. And then its members’ first impulse upon receiving emails from five thousand or so constituents (representing less than 1% of the population of even the smallest Congressional district) to express their discontent with such is to believe that those constituents couldn’t possibly be real. Simply cross-referencing the ample identifying information with the districts’ voter file and—if overkill is your style—sending inquiries to a handful of email-senders would’ve done the trick. The people who emailed the congressman most frequently are precisely those whose concerns he should have taken most seriously, for being the most engaged in the political process.

  Though he’d been among Congress’s most intransigent, even Quigley eventually came around, releasing a statement after the blackout that read “I have decided to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and will continue to oppose anti-piracy legislation until a compromise can be struck that protects the free and open nature of the Internet.” What a glorious testament to the new found power of the Internet public—and to the foolishness of Quigley’s brand of pomposity.

  I LIVE, WORK, PLAY, AND LOVE ONLINE

  NICOLE POWERS

  Nicole Powers (@nicolepowers) is a writer, photographer, conversationalist, armchair anarchist, and painfully polite protester. She serves as managing editor and undercover tweeter for SuicideGirls, many of whose users engaged in creative anti-SOPA/ PIPA activism—and has done time at occupations in New York, London, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Nicole was born in the UK, currently lives in the United States, but as a denizen primarily of the Internet imagines a world where there’s no countries to live or die for (and no religion too). Her main goal in life is to live long enough to be able to upload her consciousness to the matrix. As a backup plan, she’s currently looking for an entity that is capable of keeping her online persona alive when she dies.

  I live, work, play, and love online, so if you mess with the Internet you’re messing with my world.

  During the SOPA/PIPA fight the Suicide Girls social media sites used their pin-up imagery to alert visitors about the legislation.

  As the Managing Editor of the SuicideGirls’ blog, I spend my days writing, editing, and posting content that’s relevant to our community, and as one of the undercover tweeters on the @SuicideGirls account, I spend much of my spare time interacting with our followers there.

  What I do at SG is so much more than a job—it’s a privilege and a vocation. As a writer, I’ve been given an incredible amount of freedom to raise awareness for the issues I’m passionate about. As an editor, my greatest joy is to allow other similarly passionate voices to be heard. And as a member of the social media team, I have the pleasure of interacting with a group of tweeps that really “get it.”

  Founded in 2001, SuicideGirls was actually one of the first social networks, predating Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. As such, it has a long history of attracting tech savvy early adopters, and free and forward thinkers. Though most outsiders know us as an alternative pinup site, behind the photographs of staunchly individual ladies on our homepage—images that we hope help redefine beauty—there’s a boutique community that allows members to make friends, post blogs, and interact as adults. The conversations in the myriad of groups and boards are as colorful and creative as our members, and the friends I’ve made over the years on the site are of the caliber that I will retain for life.

  On the blog we cover many topics that are obviously related to the site, such as tattoos, piercings, sex, relationships, and geek culture. But SuicideGirls also has a long tradition of campaigning for freedom of expression and social issues, and covering the politics that relate to them too. I can hear the needle scratching off the record in the minds of the uninitiated at the mention of politics being posted alongside our bewbs, but this is actually more logical than you may think when you consider the origins of our name.

  SuicideGirls doesn’t refer to any lemming-like tendencies to jump off cliffs. Rather it was a phrase coined by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, which he used in his 1999 novel Survivor. We use it to describe women who choose to commit social suicide from the mainstream by permanently marking their bodies with tattoos. This concept of social suicide also explains why there’s a natural affinity between us and social justice movements that promote progressive ideas that exist outside of the mainstream.

  When SOPA and its ugly sister PIPA first reared their ugly heads, unlike the technological Neanderthals who drafted it, the hive mind on Twitter soon zoned in on the problematic small print and the ramifications thereof. Reading the tweets that bore the #SOPA hashtag that swarmed within our stream, it rapidly became apparent that this legislation would have a chilling effect on sites such as SuicideGirls, which incorporate massive amounts of user generated content. It would be utterly impractical and economically unviable to police the providence of all the links and content posted by our models and members on their blogs and in the countless forums and comments threads prior to publishing. And being forced to do so would seriously stifle the freedom of speech that our community currently enjoys.

  Under the restrictive and open-ended terms of SOPA, it would be virtually impossible for a site such as ours to function, which is why we—along with other social media sites such as reddit, Tumblr, Flickr, F
ark, and 4chan—participated in the January 18th day of action. Unlike the more editorial driven sites we love such as Wired, Boing Boing, and Rawstory, as a subscriber funded online community offering a service to our members, blacking out entirely wasn’t an option on #J18. We therefore had to find other creative ways to protest SOPA, and show solidarity with the sites that were able to go dark.

  We posted a special “Tease of the Day” which featured the gorgeous Arabella Suicide in a set of photographs entitled “Pirate Girl.” Despite the fact that pertinent parts of her anatomy had been redacted with black bars that bore the words “STOP SOPA!” in large pink Helvetica type, it remains to this day one of the most re-tweeted items on our blog. Similarly, other posts explaining the problems with SOPA and covering the deafening #J18 silence count among our most read and shared posts. We also had fun with self-censored tweets containing messages such as “Stop #SOPA Now!!! … Before it to your Internet.”

  Despite the fact that crickets could be heard in all the coolest corners of the web, January 18, 2012 went down as an #EPIC day in Internet history, and was a veritable riot on Twitter. The day of action garnered massive support from all corners of the web, from giant organizations such as Wikipedia and Google, to grassroots blogs and Twitter accounts run by our Occupy and Anon friends.

  After being bombarded by phone calls, emails and online petitions, several senators distanced themselves from SOPA, with at least ten withdrawing their support by day’s end. With many of their fave sites offline, Internet lovers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vegas took to the streets. Meanwhile members of the artistic community made their voice heard with an open letter to Washington.