Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (6 page)

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.

“I have serious concerns about government getting involved in regulation of the Internet,” wrote Bachmann. “And about ambiguities in this legislation which could lead to an explosion of destructive, innovation-stalling lawsuits.”

Silicon Valley tends to hold quite liberal positions on matters of social policy, to which I absolutely adhere: support for gay rights, drug policy and broader criminal justice reform, less militarism, and the like. But a substantial sub-portion of tech tends towards an anarcho-capitalist economic vision whereby an optimal society is one in which perfectly networked people-points engage in frictionless commerce, with very low taxes and a minimal social safety net, and in which unions—were they ever useful—are endemic to the ossified industrial structures that governed the Old Economy.

SOPA could be read to cover social sites like Twitter and Facebook, demanding they actively take steps to prevent pirated content before it was posted. Not only were newer, venture-funded social and mobile startups the darlings of the Internet economy; they were exactly the tools one would use to defeat government censorship, whether earlier in 2011 in Egypt or, now, in the United States.

It was this dynamic, triggered by SOPA but not by PIPA, which caused the Internet—led by smaller players like Tumblr and reddit, more than by established players like Google—to go on nuclear alert.

Not only was PIPA a priority for both Hollywood and its major unions like the Teamsters, but the analogous dynamic was playing out at the national scale, with storybook antagonists like the Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO both supportive, and even purveying joint propaganda at their various Capitol Hill lobby days. Indeed, noting organized labor’s support for the legislation was one of proponents’ mantras throughout the battle.

One lobbyist involved in the anti-SOPA effort described the scene early one morning in the cafeteria at the Rayburn House Office Building at the height of
the debate. Their team would convene at around 7:30 a.m. for member and staff meetings, and had so much ground to cover with that no more than one person was ever in meeting with a member or staffer at once; usually, in-house lobbyists and consultants teamed up. They also noticed the entertainment lobby was out in full force, with around fifty lobbyists convened at eight or nine tables pushed together. The anti-SOPA lobbyists set forth for their first wave of meetings, and reconvened at 9 a.m. When they returned, they noticed something odd: few if any of the pro-SOPA lobbyists appeared to have moved from their seats in an hour and a half.

Labor’s support for SOPA/PIPA was by no means uniform: institutional leadership tended to support the bills, but without exception, actual rank-and-file union members and organizers whom I spoke to were aghast to learn of the work that labor officials were undertaking in their names. And even some institutional players broke free from the apparent pro-SOPA/PIPA consensus. One unsung hero of this story is the Writers Guild of America, West, which in 2007 had gained the nation’s attention and sympathy when its members went on strike over DVD and new media residuals.

“On the House side, Keyser and Barrios met with Reps. Henry Waxman, Howard Berman, and Janice Hahn. They thanked Waxman for his strong support of Guild issues and discussed concerns with the recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Because Berman is a co-sponsor of SOPA, the pair discussed their concerns with the bill’s implications for competition and an open Internet. Although the WGAW strongly supports combating piracy, the competition, First Amendment, and due process concerns the bill creates must be addressed.”

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. 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.”

During a freak snowstorm on Halloween, FFTF discussed how disturbed they were by what SOPA would do if it passed. We realized that if SOPA passed, we could wake up someday to see some of our favorite websites seized by the government without due process or even a real warning. That became the driving concept we latched onto: we’d work to raise awareness of the censoring power of these bills by convincing websites to “take down” their own sites in an Internet-wide protest. As an early salvo, FFTF began to plan a day of protest called “American Censorship Day” on November 16—the date of the first SOPA hearing.

Fight for the Future (for which I was doing some contract work at the time) took the lead in organizing the critical “American Censorship Day” in mid-November. It’s when reddit and Tumblr formally joined the effort—and Demand Progress provided some tech support for them. The effort steered many hundreds of thousands of new constituent contacts to Congress.

Ahead of the hearing, ten House members—among them Ron Paul, Jared Polis, Issa, and Lofgren—sent a letter to Smith and ranking Democrat John Conyers warning that SOPA would target domestic websites and urging them to go slow. While Silicon Valley was heavily represented on the letter, the signatures also began to tell the story of the coalition’s broadening reach, with representatives from tech corridors in Austin, Boulder, and Pittsburgh signing on. The letter also meant that there would be a divided house on SOPA right off the blocks—the opposition numbered a dozen members, to the twenty-four who had signed on as SOPA co-sponsors as of November 15th. While not numerically even, it was better than the 40-to-1 split that persisted in the Senate. And it would mean that there would be substantial opposition in both parties, raising the specter of chaos on the House floor.

As I learned more about it, I knew it was really bad. When I say really, I mean really fucking bad. I have been a long-time open-Internet advocate, and many of my colleagues said, “This is the worst bill we have seen in the past decade.”

Here was a bill proposed by lobbyists of the content industry—in the U.S., the RIAA and MPAA; internationally, the IFPI and many more. They said it was about piracy, but it was really about something more. It was part of a war on sharing, a fight against the way that the open, distributed Internet works. It was a blatant attempt to preserve their business models to the detriment of artists, innovators, and the public at large. And it was poised to pass. I called up some of my friends at Mozilla (you may have heard of their browser, Firefox) and said that we had to do something, and quick.

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.” 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.

For those keeping count, more than 140 Internet engineers and cybersecurity experts, including the people that built the Internet, told Congress that filtering is dangerous while a grand total of three individuals said it was totally fine. Another argument was that the mere fact that the cable industry endorsed SOPA was proof that DNS filtering was not that big of a deal. I suppose it is just a coincidence that the NBCU (also Comcast) merely happens to be the largest and most powerful member of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

Despite all the advances in connecting with representatives and senators, emails and online petitions just don’t get the same immediate attention from most Members of Congress that is created by a massive inpouring of phone calls. Petitions get noticed too, but elected officials know that a person who takes the time to call is also likely to take the time to walk into a voting booth. A few social network sites made an initial effort to generate phone calls in opposition, but it fell short. There were not enough phone calls, and many calls were made to the district offices of Members of Congress—when policy staffs and Members were in Washington. Hardly anyone noticed. But the effort was getting attention from tech bloggers and some online media sources. It was clear SOPA was being taken seriously as the threat it was. But would a large enough effort come in time?

If SOPA were to have passed it is within reason to believe—depending on how the Courts interpreted “engage in, enable, or facilitate” copyright infringement—that Facebook posts, Twitter links, and really any Internet service or app that allows a user to post and others to view would have to screen material. A site like YouTube would need to preview the seventy-two hours of video uploaded each minute, and then approve the video. The companies would have to screen material either manually or using automatic filters with high false positive rates and no real way to check for “fair use.” They would have done this filtering either preemptively or very quickly after it was posted.

The political case for passing SOPA had been utterly decimated by the way its proponents handled the process in the Judiciary Committee, starting with a propagandistic one-sided November hearing that singled out Google as the bill’s sole opponent, and ignored the other “nerds” beating down Smith’s door to testify. Dismissal of the technical concerns—and of any real debate whatsoever—was cited by many in the technology industry as the catalyst for first getting involved and spurring their users to action.

My foray into the political arena began with an email on November 6, 2011. Christina Xu, who works with me at Breadpig—a social enterprise I’d started—sent along a note from a friend who alerted her to a pair of bills that looked destined to pass the House and Senate before the New Year. Written with over $94 million in lobbying from the entertainment industry, the first versions of SOPA and PIPA read as though a technologist had never even been consulted. If either of these bills had been law back in 2005 when Steve and I founded reddit together, the site wouldn’t exist today.

And like that, the alarms went off. We had to do something huge. And luckily the Internet is the perfect platform for doing big things.

The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary, and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as currency, and sees any obstacle to its free flow as inefficient friction to be engineered out of existence.

Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet—are developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world. Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the
best idea and implementation should always win—not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

In their political youth, Internet users are still profoundly idealistic and even a little naïve. They believe in democracy, freedom of expression, and transparent governance; they have little tolerance for draconian rules, for back-room deals, or for imposed legalistic “solutions” to poorly-defined problems that might be better solved with more technology. They are, if anything, more libertarian than anything else. But even that label implies a willingness to engage in traditional political theater, a willingness that doesn’t exist.