Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (8 page)

The markup and amendment process helped to detail the failings of SOPA, from cyber-security to privacy to free speech. Finally, the delay gave time and opportunity to organize opposition among Internet users.

Tumblr had built an incredible tool that enabled all its users to easily call their politicians. And like that, we had nearly one hundred thousand calls to Congress—quite possibly the largest number of calls that had ever been made to Congress in one day. We shut down the lines.

That morning, there was talk that Chaffetz’s DNSSEC objection, encapsulated by his “bring in the nerds” riff, had struck a chord in the committee. He went to Smith, asking for a hearing on the technical and security implications of the bill before voting the bill out of committee, and wasn’t shot down. A concession like this would have been unprecedented. Capitol Hill watchers couldn’t recall a time when a bill entered the markup phase, only to go back for further fact-finding hearings. It was an embarrassing concession by the proponents that they hadn’t done their homework, and a sign of the full retreat to come.
Things didn’t have a chance to play out like that. At 1:30 p.m., eleven hours and twenty-eight minutes into the proceedings, Smith took the microphone and announced that the committee would stand in recess, following word of a full House recess.

The following day the House recessed for the year and Congress left town, so the Committee was unable to finish the markup and kicked it over to January.

This was an important development for several reasons. First, I was later advised that over two hundred thousand people watched the telecast or webcast of the markup. Many who watched were apparently unimpressed by the arguments for the bill and by the apparent lack of Internet knowledge shown by some of the pro-SOPA Members of Congress.

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 be have 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 result was simply amazing. Normally a couple of dozen people watch a Congressional hearing. But here, more than one hundred thousand Americans watched the legislative hearing on SOPA on the Internet and millions of people signed petitions opposing the bill. At that point, I finally began to believe we could realistically water down or outright stop these bills. Once people started calling Congress, writing letters, and attending town halls to express their displeasure, groups like mine finally had the leverage necessary to start winning.

There were cracks in the armor now: Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House Democrats, had made her opposition to the bill known on American Censorship Day—via Twitter, no less. We’d collectively steered in a few million more emails to Congress. There was increased resonance among the public.

Capitalizing on the extra time, I did an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on
reddit.com
on December 16, 2011. In this forum, a site which is a favorite community for many of the Internet-savvy, I encouraged folks to contact their Members of Congress, and argued that SOPA was a grave threat to the Internet. I reassured the reddit community that, indeed, their representatives would listen to them if they spoke up.

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.

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 list up to date on the latest legislative events. FFTF and its allies went into high gear, seeking to expand the number of participating websites.

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.

“Walt Disney Co. President and CEO Bob Iger declined the invitation on behalf of content providers. ‘Hollywood did not feel that a meeting with Silicon Valley would be productive at this time,’ said a spokesperson. The meeting took place with only tech companies present. Feinstein, once a reliable vote for the existing version of Protect IP, is now working hard to amend the bill, according to Senate Democratic aides.”

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.

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.

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, AOL placed a full-page ad in the
New York Times
about SOPA.

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.

Many Wikipedia users were individually interested in participating in a blackout, and we got the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, but we were told that the decision for Wikipedia to participate in the blackout would require a community-wide conversation and decision-making process. We followed their advice and posted the idea of Wikipedia blacking out on the Village pump section of Wikipedia, where active users congregate to discuss meta-concerns about the site. We crossed our fingers.

I had talked a lot about melting the phone lines, and using the Internet’s communication power to impact Congress. Now, Internet leaders emerged, and the idea of a blackout was considered. A group of sites decided to participate. Along with others, I began to lobby tech leaders to try to increase the size and effectiveness of the blackout. On Monday, January 16th Craigslist jumped the gun and used its platform to sound the alarm about SOPA. I emailed Craig Newmark to thank him and then emailed others in the tech world to urge that they join the cause. I was later told that in the two weeks prior to mid-January, SOPA was the number one news topic for Americans under age 30. Most Americans over age 30 had never heard of it.

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.

As anger on the Internet rose, the ever-energetic reddit community decided to fight back. How? Shut down the site for an entire day. The Wikipedia community then decided to follow suit. As did Mozilla, Google, Tumblr, I Can Haz Cheeseburger, and many, many more. All in all, over eighteen million people took action. Hell, even my mom told me that she “voted” for “privacy” (not quite Mom, but thanks for the support!).

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.

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, Fark, and 4chan—participated in the January 18th day of action. Unlike the more editorially-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.

You could have watched the nightly news every day during these few months, and wouldn’t have known that any of this happened. The progressive watchdog Media Matters noted in mid-January 2012 that none of the major broadcast or cable news networks ever produced a segment on the SOPA/PIPA fight in their primetime coverage. That’s because ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN all supported the bill.

The Wikipedia community got closer and closer to approving a site-wide blackout on U.S. Wikipedia, with 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.)

A number of us had been working for months (some for years) to raise public awareness of the looming threat, but by January 18th it was laughably obvious our collective efforts paid off. Proof? Even Kim Kardashian got in on the action. That night the celebrity most famous for being famous tweeted the following warning to her millions of followers: “We must stop SOPA/PIPA to keep the web open & free.”