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

  I got in touch with Christina’s friend, who’d started a non-profit called Fight From The Future, and I offered to help. I’d do whatever they needed to help beat the bad legislation.

  Fortuitously, just a few days later, a group of entrepreneurs and technologists led by the Consumer Electronics Association were meeting with senators, representatives, and their staffs in Washington D.C. They invited me along. I live in Brooklyn, but it just so happened I was already scheduled to be in D.C. for a speaking event with Mashable. Life is funny like that. My dad even had a tie I could borrow.

  We went from meeting to meeting telling our stories; each of us was given only a few minutes to get our points across. I represented the token “startup entrepreneur” who’d been fortunate enough to live the American Dream with his college roommate. What got Washington’s attention was the pitch I’d refined the night before with the help of the reddit community. I asked redditors (in the subreddit r/technology) for feedback on my talking points, and they helped strengthen and hone my argument.

  It all boiled down to one thing. At a time when the American economy was still finding her swagger, our sector was growing, hiring, and leading the world in innovation. I wanted to be sure each person in that room imagined a constituent back in their home district not unlike me or my peers, who could be the next great entrepreneur—prematurely squelched by some thoughtless legislation. Or as many redditors repeated: “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.”

  No one, no matter how much or how little he or she understood about technology, wanted to be responsible for threatening the already weakened U.S. economy.

  It was the same message I brought to a meeting of New York tech executives hosted by tumblr a couple weeks later. I was surprised by the chosen date, but apparently I was the only one celebrating SantaCon that day. Nonetheless, before celebrating with hordes of my fellow Kringles, I took a seat and we went around the room, volunteering contributions from our websites that might help spread the word about SOPA and PIPA.

  Today, reddit is one of the 100 most popular sites online, but it’s rare in that the platform is rather open—much like the Internet itself. My offering was simple: we’d present the threat to the reddit community and give them our rationale behind the opposition. I didn’t know how our millions of users would react to the imminent threat, but I knew the best ideas for action wouldn’t come from me or even this room of “experts.” The best idea would come from the crowd. The magic of reddit comes from an appreciation Steve and I had from the day we launched—nothing would work without a truly empowered community. So we’d guide people to a common subreddit (r/SOPA) and see what bubbled up.

  I posted a quick YouTube video explaining why I was publicly in opposition: “The story of reddit, where Steve Huffman and I started it from an apartment in Medford, MA with 12k in funding from Y Combinator simply could not have happened in a world with this bill … and it’s not just reddit, it’s every single other social media site out there that would be threatened by this bill. And that is devastating. It’s something we simply cannot afford to do from an economic standpoint.”

  An unprecedented display of democracy in action culminated on January 18, with simultaneously offline and online protests. Before our eyes, we saw what most Washington insiders called a “sure thing” become the biggest upset they could recall. This all happened thanks to the millions of empowered Americans using the very social media platforms we wanted to protect along with our Internet freedom.

  Wikipedia going dark on January 18 in protest of SOPA and PIPA made the story unavoidable for the mainstream media, but it was volunteer moderators of the most popular subreddits who first advocated for the blackout. Enough moderators agreed to go dark, that the administrative team at reddit announced an overall blackout of the site. They would replace the stream of popular links and discussions with calls to action on how to stop SOPA.

  On January 18, 2012, the homepage of Reddit.com went black and carried a message asking users to take action against SOPA/PIPA.

  It was a leaderful movement indeed. Anonymous redditors pushed reddit into being the first of thousands of sites, including Wikipedia and Google, to take action on that fateful day. Similarly, another redditor suggested a boycott of GoDaddy, which supported the bills for long enough to feel the wrath of a coordinated domain transfer away from their service before relenting and apologizing for backing the legislation. As people called their senators and representatives to argue their position, they shared their stories online, encouraging others to do the same.

  Thanks to the millions of individuals who engaged and took action for something they believed in, Internet freedom was preserved (at least for the time being). It is my hope that this success is only the first of many triumphs of citizens over lobbying dollars. Even a startup founder like me who has no business in politics found a way to be helpful in this fight, which is sadly far from over. Remember: our politicians work for us. Make sure you’re being a good boss—make sure they remember, as my favorite protest sign read: “It’s no longer OK to not know how the Internet works.”

  IF REDDIT’S TURNED OFF, MAYBE THEY’LL LEAVE THE HOUSE THAT DAY

  DAVID SEGAL

  We kept hearing that we should target our messaging at Senator Chuck Schumer ( D-NY), given his particular sensitivity to potential political liabilities for Democratic Senate candidates. Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate, previously served as the Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee where he’d been in charge of getting Democrats elected to the Senate. He is still incredibly ambitious, angling to be the leader of Senate Democrats once Harry Reid retires, so he needs to pay attention to changing political currents.

  A coalition of Internet freedom advocates, many from the burgeoning New York Silicon Alley tech scene which Schumer cares to impress, took this advice to heart.

  On January 18th, 2012, the New York Tech Meetup took the lead as Demand Progress and allied groups buttressed their efforts to organize an anti-SOPA rally outside of the midtown tower that houses Schumer’s office. We concentrated the movement’s focus on the office of this powerful senator, and provided the press with a 3D spectacle that served as an accessible representation of the otherwise abstract online activism. Even the likes of Congressman Mike Quigley’s staffers—who literally didn’t believe how many emails they were receiving—were forced to contend with the concept that there are, indeed, real, live people who care about these issues. The New Yorker’s write-up affectionately (and accurately) called it a “Nerd Parade.” Activists in San Francisco organized a smaller rally, and several others were scattered about the rest of the country.

  Hundreds of people gathered in protest outside the New York City offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand on January 18, 2012.

  I showed up around noon, a half hour before show time, to find a dozen reporters and maybe thirty activists already milling about inside and around the protest cage that the NYPD had erected. It was about twenty feet wide, taking up perhaps a third of the width of the sidewalk along Third Avenue, and stretching half of the length of the block. We had no idea what to expect, and the cops even less so—some amalgam of New York tech bigwigs, Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, painfully hip hipsters, and angry video gamers, and a sprinkling of Guy Fawkes masks?

  The rally’s organizers had spread word to one hundred thousand or so of the Tri-State’s geeks and activists over the few days prior. Several hundred had RSVPed, but we had no way of knowing how many would actually show up for what we were shamelessly calling the biggest (non-virtual) Internet freedom rally in U.S. history. We weren’t sure exactly what threshold we needed to hit to legitimize this branding, but were certain that the bar wasn’t too high.

  Though he’d eventually see the light and help halt SOPA/PIPA, Schumer had largely been ignoring our pleas. Out of frustration or something else, his staff had even told a couple of constituents who’d called that the senator was “pro-censorship.” He’
d already received hundreds of thousands of emails, and over the previous few days thirty thousand or so Demand Progress members had tweeted at him. (His office was conveniently located in the same building as New York’s junior Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was just as intransigent but less important.)

  With inside information on Capitol Hill indicating that influencing Senator Chuck Schumer could be key to stopping SOPA/PIPA, activists quickly mobilized a protest outside of his office in New York. This photo shows some of the thousands of angry Internet users rallying outside the offices of Schumer and his fellow Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

  On the day that thousands of sites went dark to protest SOPA, we forsook our (non-mobile) electronic screens and took to the streets. Losing the Internet had helped swell the ranks of protesters in Tahrir Square: perhaps we could make something marginally analogous happen here.

  I’d only slept a few hours the night before, in a cheap hotel near Penn Station—we were launching a “money-bomb” for pro-Internet politicians to coincide with the blackout that morning—so I was struggling to stay awake while fending off my psychosomatic inklings that I’d been colonized by an extended family of bedbugs. Demand Progress had helped organize the rally, but I’d only just realized I’d landed on the speaking program and was struggling to force my foggy brain to focus on what I might say to whoever happened to make it out.

  And then there were people. The police extended the barriers away from the stage, so they now ran the whole length of the block. Ten minutes later we’d taken over two lanes of midtown, noontime traffic in addition to half the sidewalk. Then so many people filled the sidewalk that all the police could do was keep a clear walkway as wide as a couple of concrete panels: there were more than two thousand of us.

  The crowd didn’t quite know what to do: it was easy to catch ambient exclamations along the lines of “this is the first time I’ve ever really protested anything!” The call-and-response chant, ubiquitous at left-leaning protests, “Tell me what democracy looks like? THIS is what democracy looks like!” lost its sing-song rhythm as it was soliloquized: “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks likes like,” both asked and answered by a speaker on the stage. He was probably hedging: who can say if the protesters would’ve known how to respond if they’d been beckoned? These weren’t veteran activists, and nobody had yet invented whatever chants one’s supposed to recite at an Internet rally. This was something new. And that was one of the most consistently inspiring elements of the fight against SOPA and its predecessor bills. Over the course of the effort, untold numbers of Americans were politicized for the first time. Seniors who import cheap prescription drugs took to Internet activism. Video gamers took to the streets. Political antagonists—or those who are told they’re forever and always supposed to be political antagonists—found common cause as they took on a corrupt and ossified political establishment. Two days later, SOPA and PIPA were formally declared dead, and we (tens of millions of us) had pulled off the impossible. The other side was holding the straight flush of American politics: a bipartisan, political establishment-backed, industry-supported, horribly esoteric piece of legislation, coverage of which had been blacked out by the mainstream media—and yet we’d managed to beat them.

  INTERNET 1, CONGRESS 0

  PATRICK RUFFINI

  In the Senate, a partisan dimension emerged late in the game. Once SOPA had been dealt a blow with the inconclusive end of the House markup, supporters decided to play their ace-in-the-hole, the Senate. Within 24 hours, Harry Reid announced that the motion to proceed on PIPA would be taken up as the Senate’s very first order of business in January.

  This move caught the Republican cosponsors by surprise, among them influential Judiciary Committee veteran Orrin Hatch of Utah. The ground was shifting from underneath the bills by the minute, and Leahy had gone directly to Reid to the surprise of the other cosponsors, some of whom were starting to get cold feet. It’s likely that proponents could have weathered this rift had the political situation not worsened, but the bill was now going to be left hanging out for a month over the holiday season, when Congress was in recess but the Internet most definitely wasn’t.

  Hatch, in particular, had emerged as a key Senate bellwether. A songwriter and one of Hollywood’s staunchest allies over the years, he also faced a Tea Party primary challenge that spring, a threat he did not take lightly. Sitting alongside Hatch on the Judiciary Committee was Mike Lee, a Utah freshman who had knocked off 18-year incumbent Bob Bennett at the state party convention the year before. Back in Utah, Hatch was working furiously to avoid Bennett’s fate, and PIPA was emerging as a potential complication for re-election—as it was an easy issue for the Tea Party to attack Hatch as part of an out-of-touch establishment. If Lee were to get out ahead of Hatch in opposing the bills, it would have been read as an ominous signal that Lee’s successful Tea Party challenge to an incumbent was now repeating itself. From Hatch’s perspective, there could be no daylight between himself on Mike Lee on any major issue, especially one like PIPA that came to embody a grassroots struggle against the Washington establishment.

  As it was, both Hatch and Lee were part of the unanimous 18-0 committee vote reporting PIPA out of committee, but it was Hatch, with his long-standing track record on IP issues, who cosponsored the bill. As the PIPA vote neared, he was having doubts and was looking for a way out.

  On January 9th, Lee would become the first Judiciary Committee member to publicly threaten to vote against PIPA. It was a harbinger of the bill’s declining fortunes, and an indicator of which way the more senior Hatch was going.

  Four days later, Lee and Hatch would join together on a remarkable letter from senior Republicans that heightened the partisan stakes and made clear that PIPA’s prospects were now no better than SOPA. Signed by a majority of the Judiciary Committee’s GOP membership, including ranking member (and cosponsor) Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the letter pleaded with Harry Reid to slam the brakes on PIPA and delay the cloture vote now scheduled for January 24th:

  Since the markup, we have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights. Moreover, in light of potential cybersecurity implications, we believe hearing from the Administration and relevant agencies is imperative. As always, our current fiscal crisis demands we carefully consider legislation that would cost taxpayers up to $43 million according to the Congressional Budget Office. These are serious issues that must be considered in an deliberative and responsible manner. This underscores the need to resolve as many outstanding concerns as possible prior to proceeding to floor consideration.

  As detailed elsewhere in this volume, the pace of events had quickened and intensified starting with the House markup, with the planned January 24th cloture vote exerting a gravitational pull that kept our momentum going over the holidays, while Congress was in recess. For those of us who had been involved day-to-day, it felt like a time warp. Single days saw more action than months-long stretches the previous summer and fall.

  The actions of senators and representatives must be considered against this backdrop of rising public awareness. Immediately after the markup, right-leaning opposition had started to solidify, with two leading conservative bellwethers—the Heritage Foundation and RedState’s Erick Erickson—joining the opposition on December 20th and 22nd respectively. In Erickson’s case, the point was made in a manner highly likely to get the attention of members and staff: a suggestion that the left and right band together to primary any incumbent who supported this monstrosity, including staunch RedState allies like Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, a vocal SOPA supporter in the House.

  In late December and early January, SOPA and PIPA went from an issue of interest to “stakeholders” to one of intense interest to constituents. And th
is made all the difference in how members of Congress reacted.

  Source: Topsy.com

  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.

  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.

  As Congressional staff trickled back to their desks in the first week of January, they were coming to grips with the magnitude of what had happened over the holiday break. 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.