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 B

stop SOAP.” Progress.
Ernesto Falcon
    For those keeping count, more than 140 Internet engineers and cybersecurity experts, including the people that built the Internet, told Congress that filtering is dangerous while a grand total of three individuals said it was totally fine. Another argument was that the mere fact that the cable industry endorsed SOPA was proof that DNS filtering was not that big of a deal. I suppose it is just a coincidence that the NBCU (also Comcast) merely happens to be the largest and most powerful member of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
Zoe Lofgren
    Despite all the advances in connecting with representatives and senators, emails and online petitions just don’t get the same immediate attention from most Members of Congress that is created by a massive inpouring of phone calls. Petitions get noticed too, but elected officials know that a person who takes the time to call is also likely to take the time to walk into a voting booth. A few social network sites made an initial effort to generate phone calls in opposition, but it fell short. There were not enough phone calls, and many calls were made to the district offices of Members of Congress—when policy staffs and Members were in Washington. Hardly anyone noticed. But the effort was getting attention from tech bloggers and some online media sources. It was clear SOPA was being taken seriously as the threat it was. But would a large enough effort come in time?
Edward J. Black (President and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association)
    If SOPA were to have passed it is within reason to believe—depending on how the Courts interpreted “engage in, enable, or facilitate” copyright infringement—that Facebook posts, Twitter links, and really any Internet service or app that allows a user to post and others to view would have to screen material. A site like YouTube would need to preview the seventy-two hours of video uploaded each minute, and then approve the video. The companies would have to screen material either manually or using automatic filters with high false positive rates and no real way to check for “fair use.” They would have done this filtering either preemptively or very quickly after it was posted.
Patrick Ruffini
    The political case for passing SOPA had been utterly decimated by the way its proponents handled the process in the Judiciary Committee, starting with a propagandistic one-sided November hearing that singled out Google as the bill’s sole opponent, and ignored the other “nerds” beating down Smith’s door to testify. Dismissal of the technical concerns—and of any real debate whatsoever—was cited by many in the technology industry as the catalyst for first getting involved and spurring their users to action.
Alex Ohanian (co-founder of reddit)
    My foray into the political arena began with an email on November 6, 2011. Christina Xu, who works with me at Breadpig—a social enterprise I’d started—sent along a note from a friend who alerted her to a pair of bills that looked destined to pass the House and Senate before the New Year. Written with over $94 million in lobbying from the entertainment industry, the first versions of SOPA and PIPA read as though a technologist had never even been consulted. If either of these bills had been law back in 2005 when Steve and I founded reddit together, the site wouldn’t exist today.
Elizabeth Stark
    And like that, the alarms went off. We had to do something huge. And luckily the Internet is the perfect platform for doing big things.
Larry Downes
    The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary, and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats