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

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Authors: and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL035000
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majority of whom had surely never heard of SOPA, or ever engaged in political protest.
Zoe Lofgren
    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.
Elizabeth Stark
    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.
Patrick Ruffini
    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.
Zoe Lofgren
    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.
David Segal
    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.
Ernesto Falcon
    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.
David Segal
    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.
Zoe Lofgren
    Capitalizing on the extra time, I did an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on

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