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 Read Free Book Online Page A
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a much older inmate. Within a few days we’d struck the mother lode: a radio host confronted Bieber about the bill and the concocted controversy. His response was to deliver a rather heartfelt (though clearly teenaged) soliloquy about how important it is that people be free to perform and share music; that he loves watching fans’ YouTube performances of his hits; and, most critically, that Amy Klobuchar “needs to be locked up, put away in cuffs.”
5. American Censorship Day
Tiffiniy Cheng
During a freak snowstorm on Halloween, FFTF discussed how disturbed they were by what SOPA would do if it passed. We realized that if SOPA passed, we could wake up someday to see some of our favorite websites seized by the government without due process or even a real warning. That became the driving concept we latched onto: we’d work to raise awareness of the censoring power of these bills by convincing websites to “take down” their own sites in an Internet-wide protest. As an early salvo, FFTF began to plan a day of protest called “American Censorship Day” on November 16—the date of the first SOPA hearing.
David Segal
Fight for the Future (for which I was doing some contract work at the time) took the lead in organizing the critical “American Censorship Day” in mid-November. It’s when reddit and Tumblr formally joined the effort—and Demand Progress provided some tech support for them. The effort steered many hundreds of thousands of new constituent contacts to Congress.
Patrick Ruffini
Ahead of the hearing, ten House members—among them Ron Paul, Jared Polis, Issa, and Lofgren—sent a letter to Smith and ranking Democrat John Conyers warning that SOPA would target domestic websites and urging them to go slow. While Silicon Valley was heavily represented on the letter, the signatures also began to tell the story of the coalition’s broadening reach, with representatives from tech corridors in Austin, Boulder, and Pittsburgh signing on. The letter also meant that there would be a divided house on SOPA right off the blocks—the opposition numbered a dozen members, to the twenty-four who had signed on as SOPA co-sponsors as of November 15th. While not numerically even, it was better than the 40-to-1 split that persisted in the Senate. And it would mean that there would be substantial opposition in both parties, raising the specter of chaos on the House floor.
Elizabeth Stark (co-founder of the Open Video Alliance)
As I learned more about it, I knew it was really bad. When I say really, I mean really fucking bad. I have been a long-time open-Internet advocate, and many of my colleagues said, “This is the worst bill we have seen in the past decade.”
Here was a bill proposed by lobbyists of the content industry—in the U.S., the RIAA and MPAA; internationally, the IFPI and many more. They said it was about piracy, but it was really about something more. It was part of a war on sharing, a fight against the way that the open, distributed Internet works. It was a blatant attempt to preserve their business models to the detriment of artists, innovators, and the public at large. And it was poised to pass. I called up some of my friends at Mozilla (you may have heard of their browser, Firefox) and said that we had to do something, and quick.
Aaron Swartz
When the bill came back and started moving again, it all started coming together. All the folks we had talked to suddenly began really getting involved—and getting others involved. Everything started snowballing. It happened so fast. I remember one week, I was having dinner with a fellow in the technology industry. He asked what I worked on and I told him about this bill. “Wow,” he said. “You need to tell people about that.” And then, just a few weeks later, I was chatting with this cute girl on the subway. She wasn’t involved in the technology industry, but when she heard that I was, she turned to me, very seriously, and said “You know, we have to
5. American Censorship Day
Tiffiniy Cheng
During a freak snowstorm on Halloween, FFTF discussed how disturbed they were by what SOPA would do if it passed. We realized that if SOPA passed, we could wake up someday to see some of our favorite websites seized by the government without due process or even a real warning. That became the driving concept we latched onto: we’d work to raise awareness of the censoring power of these bills by convincing websites to “take down” their own sites in an Internet-wide protest. As an early salvo, FFTF began to plan a day of protest called “American Censorship Day” on November 16—the date of the first SOPA hearing.
David Segal
Fight for the Future (for which I was doing some contract work at the time) took the lead in organizing the critical “American Censorship Day” in mid-November. It’s when reddit and Tumblr formally joined the effort—and Demand Progress provided some tech support for them. The effort steered many hundreds of thousands of new constituent contacts to Congress.
Patrick Ruffini
Ahead of the hearing, ten House members—among them Ron Paul, Jared Polis, Issa, and Lofgren—sent a letter to Smith and ranking Democrat John Conyers warning that SOPA would target domestic websites and urging them to go slow. While Silicon Valley was heavily represented on the letter, the signatures also began to tell the story of the coalition’s broadening reach, with representatives from tech corridors in Austin, Boulder, and Pittsburgh signing on. The letter also meant that there would be a divided house on SOPA right off the blocks—the opposition numbered a dozen members, to the twenty-four who had signed on as SOPA co-sponsors as of November 15th. While not numerically even, it was better than the 40-to-1 split that persisted in the Senate. And it would mean that there would be substantial opposition in both parties, raising the specter of chaos on the House floor.
Elizabeth Stark (co-founder of the Open Video Alliance)
As I learned more about it, I knew it was really bad. When I say really, I mean really fucking bad. I have been a long-time open-Internet advocate, and many of my colleagues said, “This is the worst bill we have seen in the past decade.”
Here was a bill proposed by lobbyists of the content industry—in the U.S., the RIAA and MPAA; internationally, the IFPI and many more. They said it was about piracy, but it was really about something more. It was part of a war on sharing, a fight against the way that the open, distributed Internet works. It was a blatant attempt to preserve their business models to the detriment of artists, innovators, and the public at large. And it was poised to pass. I called up some of my friends at Mozilla (you may have heard of their browser, Firefox) and said that we had to do something, and quick.
Aaron Swartz
When the bill came back and started moving again, it all started coming together. All the folks we had talked to suddenly began really getting involved—and getting others involved. Everything started snowballing. It happened so fast. I remember one week, I was having dinner with a fellow in the technology industry. He asked what I worked on and I told him about this bill. “Wow,” he said. “You need to tell people about that.” And then, just a few weeks later, I was chatting with this cute girl on the subway. She wasn’t involved in the technology industry, but when she heard that I was, she turned to me, very seriously, and said “You know, we have to
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