Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (7 page)

I recently heard a woman from the Occupy movement say the most poignant thing. She said “no one is coming for us.” Her generation does not expect the government to be there when they need it, nor do they think the incumbent industrial hierarchies are structured or motivated to address the challenges they expect to face. Remarkably, she was not depressed, defeated, or bitter. She was determined. The kids who grew up inside AOL chat rooms and came of age on Facebook have an intuitive understanding of the power of networks that our generation will never have. They are not asking us to fix the problems we left them with. They are asking us not to get in their way as they try to dig themselves out. I think we owe them that.

The engineering task forces are meritocratic and open. The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. No one has seniority or a veto. There’s no influence peddling or lobbyists. The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

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.

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 start-ups, and a home base for the meeting: Tumblr’s hipster-chic offices in lower Manhattan. I leaned on Zoe Lofgren’s office to have the Congresswoman 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.

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 one hundred 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.”

We decided on a strategy. On November 16, sites such as Mozilla, Tumblr, reddit, and even 4chan would blackout their logos in protest of SOPA. Fight for the Future set up a central site called American Censorship Day, where all the sites involved were listed. And there was a call for the Internet community to get involved. This was a watershed moment in the politics of the Internet: sites like Mozilla and Tumblr took a public stance for the first time ever on a political issue.

Our path to victory was dangerously narrow. As best, I could predict, it would play out as follows: Lamar Smith would succeed in ramming the bill through markup on the Judiciary Committee, and at that point, we would need to rely on Tea Party pressure to save us at the eleventh hour by persuading House majority leader Eric Cantor not to schedule SOPA for the floor. It seemed more plausible than any other SOPA death scenario, especially as the Senate seemed far more likely to pass its own tamer version of the bill. Nonetheless, given the deference
normally given powerful committee chairs like Smith, it was a perilous path forward for the opposition.

A “markup” of a bill is a time when the committee of jurisdiction meets to go through the bill, line by line, with Members of the Committee offering amendments. It is a formal proceeding, televised and now webcast. December 15, 2011 was the beginning of the Judiciary Committee “markup” of SOPA. Showtime.

On the night of the 14th, I received a frenzied call from a tech industry lobbyist. Smith had been twisting arms, we didn’t know who was on our side anymore, and we were down to as few as half a dozen votes on the committee. The Internet needed to light up the phones. At the suggestion of a Capitol Hill veteran in my office, I would tweet out the direct line to the Judiciary committee staff room. It was reasoned that members would be taking meetings there in between votes. We brainstormed creative ways for members to experience the crescendo of outrage firsthand.

Big stories like this are just more interesting at human scale. The director J. D. Walsh said good stories should be like the poster for
Transformers
. There’s a huge robot on the left side of the poster and a huge army on the right, but in the middle, at the bottom, there’s just a small family, trapped in between. Big stories need human stakes.

In the winter of 2011 when my friend David Segal approached me about creating a YouTube video in opposition to SOPA, I knew it must be the right thing to do, because I trust David to be on the right side of things. I knew that, despite the hanging questions for artists as to how we will survive the transforming music industry, the answer would never resemble the heartless clampdown on fans proposed by SOPA. I knew that fans covering our songs at school talent shows and using our music as a soundtrack to personal slideshows deserve our gratitude, not legal action.

Issa’s crafty and resourceful social media team had set up a website,
KeeptheWebOpen.com
, initially to showcase their government transparency initiatives (including a platform called MADISON allowing wiki-style edits to legislation), that would be used as a platform to live-stream the hearings. A core of opposition quickly formed around Issa (himself a senior Republican and chairman of the Government Oversight committee), Lofgren, Polis, and Republican Jason Chaffetz of Utah.

You know that old slogan from Texas? Don’t mess with Texas. Well, some of us wanted to make sure Lamar Smith, the congressman from Texas who proposed SOPA, heard our version of the slogan: don’t mess with the Internet. A group of us, led by reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, started a crowd-funding effort that turned the slogan into a billboard in Lamar’s Texas district.

During the pivotal committee markup in mid-December, the analyses regarding cybersecurity—the whitepaper, the Sandia letter, the op-eds by Stewart Baker, a new EFF-organized letter signed by eighty-three Internet engineers—were cited repeatedly by Reps. Lofgren, Issa, Chaffetz, Polis, and the other SOPA skeptics as they criticized the bill. Rep. Chaffetz memorably chided his colleagues, “We’re going to do surgery on the Internet … without bringing in the doctors. To my colleagues I would say, if you don’t know what DNSSEC is, you don’t know what you’re doing” with this legislation.

The first sign that the opposition would not go down without a fight came with a relatively simple procedural motion: they forced a full reading of the bill before the committee—a process which would take more than an hour at the outset of the proceedings. This delay set the tone for the next two days and was set against the backdrop of an impending recess and Congress rushing to tie up loose ends before heading home for the holidays.

We had prepared well over one hundred substantive amendments to SOPA, to be offered by a bipartisan group of Members. We started the markup at 10:00 a.m. and by the time the Committee recessed twelve hours later around 10: 00 p.m., we hadn’t reached all of the amendments that needed to be offered.

The opposition on the committee planned to offer as many amendments as possible. Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, an avid gamer and the only Internet entrepreneur in Congress, planned to force the committee to vote yea or nay on barring federal funds being used to benefit pornographers—who were some of the most aggressive copyright litigators. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from northern California, would ask movie theater owners to participate in SOPA’s rigid enforcement mechanisms; after all, movie theaters were themselves intermediaries for movie piracy, with “users” making bootleg recordings. Why not hold them accountable like you would the owners a website with millions of users, some of whom traffic in pirated content? In total, fifty-five amendments would be submitted.

In Washington, the accepted wisdom by year-end was that the technology industry had matured at last into a lobbying force commensurate with its size and pocketbook. But what everyone missed was that the users had opened a third front in this fight, and clearly the one that determined its outcome. The bitroots movement wasn’t led by Google. It wasn’t led by anyone. Even to look for its leaders is to miss the point. Internet users didn’t lobby or buy their way into influence. They used the tools at their disposal—Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and the rest—to make their voices heard. They encouraged voluntary boycotts and blackouts, and organized awareness days. This was a revolt of, by, and with social networks, turning the tools that organized them into groups in the first place into potent new weapons for political advocacy. The users had figured out how to hack politics.

Reflecting the indifference of most members to the dry technical issues behind the bill, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) began venting his frustration on Twitter: “We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson [sic] has so bored me that I’m killing time by surfing the Internet.” Jackson Lee spoke up to object, calling the remark “offensive.” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), a former committee chairman hostile to SOPA, piled on, demanding that Jackson Lee withdraw her remarks. Chairman Smith suggested she withdraw the word “offensive.” After some back and forth involving the body’s Parliamentarian, and a long delay, Jackson Lee agreed to strike her one word rejoinder, and instead deem King’s tweet “impolitic and unkind.”

One of the unforgivable sins of the PIPA and SOPA process … was a complete failure to engage with anyone in the engineering community; what lawmakers on both sides of the issue regularly referred to as “bringing in the nerds.” And engineers were essential to getting it right, assuming that’s what the bills’ supporters really wanted to do. Both bills would have required ISPs to make significant changes to key Internet design principles—notably the process for translating web addresses to actual servers. Yet lawmakers freely admitted that they understood nothing of how that technology worked. Indeed, many seemed to think it was cute to begin their comments by confessing they’d never used, let alone studied, the infrastructure with which they were casually tinkering.

While televised House proceedings were nothing new (think C-SPAN), committee live-streams were rare, and this would become one of the most watched markups (if not the most watched) in history.

What made SOPA different was that much of the exchange between constituents and officials was being posted online, thus merging many private one-to-one
conversations into a massive one-to-many conversation. And the back-and-forths between different citizens and the same senator thus changed from iterations of the same query-and-response into a continuing discussion between that senator and the public at large.

Over two hundred thousand people watched the live stream of the hearing, and they tweeted and laughed about it. Why were they laughing? It was so painfully obvious that the U.S. Congress, the people we entrust to create our laws, fundamentally did not understand the Internet. There were members of Congress who had no idea what a domain name is, let alone how the Domain Name System, or DNS, works, voting on a bill that would change the very nature of this system. This was a huge wake up call. People were angry. In one of the only planned moments of levity, Congressman Jared Polis, probably the person in Congress who knows the most about the Internet, proposed an amendment saying that SOPA should not be used for porn. Basically, he was trolling. He not only told Congress about the song “The Internet Is for Porn” but asked to enter it into the Congressional record.

Tumblr went above and beyond the call of duty with one of the most creative actions of the protest: they blacked out the dashboards of their over sixty million members, the overwhelming majority of whom had surely never heard of SOPA, or ever engaged in political protest.