Read Online Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal - Free Book Online

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.
Patrick Ruffini
    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.”
Larry Downes
    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.
Patrick Ruffini
    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.
Open Congress (grassroots political activists)
    What made SOPA different was that much of the exchange between constituents and officials was being posted online, thus merging many private one-to-oneconversations 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.
Elizabeth Stark
    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.
Tiffiniy Cheng
    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