Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (27 page)

These screenshots show examples of Fight for the Future’s self-censorship tools in use.

At this point we’d been posting updates about COICA, PIPA, and SOPA to the websites FireDogLake and DailyKos for well over a year as part of my attempt to rally the Left in opposition; we did the same now, with the sense that people were finally attuned to the cause, and invested in winning it. Here’s one version of an exhilarated summary of the Tumblr meeting we posted to such sites and several listservs that weekend, which outlines the game plan we’d concocted to support our allies like Lofgren as they carried our water through the markup.

The markup (described below in more detail by Patrick Ruffini) probably was indeed the point of no return for the bill—despite the tremendous happenings that were yet to come. We had a singular mission throughout: to keep bombarding Congress with calls and emails until the markup ended, driven by email alerts to the Demand Progress and Fight for the Future email lists, each now on the order of seven hundred fifty thousand people strong, whom we steered to the American Censorship landing page. Several sites that had participated in the meeting at Tumblr, and many others, urged their users to participate too. We expected the effort to be a one-day endeavor, but as Patrick explains, it became much more complicated than that as Lamar Smith dropped his reins and utterly lost control of his committee—Republicans and Democrats alike.

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 have been 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 growing consternation put other politicians in compromising positions, and they took notice of the striking doings before the House Judiciary Committee. California Senator Dianne Feinstein went home for the holidays with the (perhaps naive) hope of brokering a ceasefire in the civil war that was brewing between her state’s North (Silicon Valley) and South (Hollywood).
Tech titans expressed that they were more than happy to meet—any indication that their concerns were being taken seriously representing clear evidence that their standing was improving. However, when she sought the presence of Hollywood, via a communiqué to Disney President Bob Iger, he made it clear that he and his associates sure weren’t going to waste their time meeting with that measly senior senator from the nation’s most populous state: they’d done more than enough talking already, and had their votes sewn up.

It’s important to remember not to stare directly at the sparks that fly when egos this large collide. But even were their stances equally righteous, it’d be hard not to preference the will of an elected official who’s third only to the president and vice president in the size of her constituency, rather than an over-paid peddler of Hollywood schlock—who’s overseen the ruination of the Muppets franchise, and now holds
Star Wars
in his clutches.

Feinstein would shift from oblivious supporter of PIPA to ambivalent, to moderately opposed, and eventually asked Harry Reid to postpone action on the legislation. We made sure that legislative staff was put on notice, as the Huffington Post reported.

In December, HuffPost reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a Protect IP co-sponsor with deep ties to both Hollywood and the technology industry, thought disputes between two of her most prominent corporate constituencies had been worked out. After that story ran, Feinstein attempted to broker a compromise, calling both tech companies and film studios.

“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.”

Then, in Maryland, we soon broke new ground by achieving our first formal Democratic convert: an original cosponsor who would publicly oppose the bill. ( Jerry Moran of Kansas was an early Republican pick-up.)

This is where David Moon’s hobby of editing a Maryland state politics blog would prove invaluable. Senator Ben Cardin (a PIPA sponsor) was nervous about a particular challenger in his April 2012 Democratic primary. With the election but months away, we signaled these dynamics to our coalition partners and went about using Moon’s online perch to drum up discontent among Maryland residents about Cardin’s support for PIPA. The senator should have already been receiving a barrage of communications about the bill, but we sought to crank up their volume and resonance.

Soon Cardin’s constituents who were employed in the tech sector began requesting meetings with him, and we aggressively pushed social media efforts to pressure Cardin to ditch the bill. In tandem, we made sure to send evidence of the unrest to Cardin’s campaign staff: campaign apparatchiks always have a finger to the air to detect shifting political winds, which can hit them with gale force before the much more insulated Hill staffers know a light breeze was
ever blowing. In early January, Cardin put out a statement responding to the controversy.

It was replete with the standard fear mongering about piracy, but we were thrilled to have finally picked off a Democratic sponsor. He would prove the only one to publicly disclaim the bill, though others maneuvered behind the scenes to ensure they’d not have to cast a vote on it.

The legislation was in a free fall now, in both the House and the Senate.

SOPA/PIPA supporters thought they had already lined up the votes they needed for passage. The charts above from VentureBeat show just how much of a resource advantage our opponents had compared with our side.

But the money disparity failed to rule the day. An angry Rupert Murdoch expresses exasperation as it becomes increasingly apparent that his policy wishes were likely not to be granted.

The days before the planned House Judiciary Committee markup on SOPA were accompanied by a sense of foreboding. The game could soon be up. If SOPA were to be voted out of committee in a landslide, as looked likely, it would be very hard to stop on the House floor.

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.