Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (39 page)

Hatch, in particular, had emerged as a key Senate bellwether. A songwriter and one of Hollywood’s staunchest allies over the years, he also faced a Tea Party primary challenge that spring, a threat he did not take lightly. Sitting alongside Hatch on the Judiciary Committee was Mike Lee, a Utah freshman who had knocked off 18-year incumbent Bob Bennett at the state party convention the year before. Back in Utah, Hatch was working furiously to avoid Bennett’s fate, and PIPA was emerging as a potential complication for re-election—as it was an easy issue for the Tea Party to attack Hatch as part of an out-of-touch establishment. If Lee were to get out ahead of Hatch in opposing the bills, it would have been read as an ominous signal that Lee’s successful Tea Party challenge to an incumbent was now repeating itself. From Hatch’s perspective, there could be no daylight between himself on Mike Lee on any major issue, especially one like PIPA that came to embody a grassroots struggle against the Washington establishment.

As it was, both Hatch and Lee were part of the unanimous 18-0 committee vote reporting PIPA out of committee, but it was Hatch, with his long-standing track record on IP issues, who cosponsored the bill. As the PIPA vote neared, he was having doubts and was looking for a way out.

On January 9th, Lee would become the first Judiciary Committee member to publicly threaten to vote against PIPA. It was a harbinger of the bill’s declining fortunes, and an indicator of which way the more senior Hatch was going.

Four days later, Lee and Hatch would join together on a remarkable letter from senior Republicans that heightened the partisan stakes and made clear that PIPA’s prospects were now no better than SOPA. Signed by a majority of the Judiciary Committee’s GOP membership, including ranking member (and cosponsor) Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the letter pleaded with Harry Reid to slam the brakes on PIPA and delay the cloture vote now scheduled for January 24th:

Since the markup, we have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights. Moreover, in light of potential cybersecurity implications, we believe hearing from the Administration and relevant agencies is imperative. As always, our current fiscal crisis demands we carefully consider legislation that would cost taxpayers up to $43 million according to the Congressional Budget Office. These are serious issues that must be considered in an deliberative and responsible manner. This underscores the need to resolve as many outstanding concerns as possible prior to proceeding to floor consideration.

As detailed elsewhere in this volume, the pace of events had quickened and intensified starting with the House markup, with the planned January 24th cloture vote exerting a gravitational pull that kept our momentum going over the holidays, while Congress was in recess. For those of us who had been involved day-to-day, it felt like a time warp. Single days saw more action than months-long stretches the previous summer and fall.

The actions of senators and representatives must be considered against this backdrop of rising public awareness. Immediately after the markup, right-leaning opposition had started to solidify, with two leading conservative bellwethers—the Heritage Foundation and RedState’s Erick Erickson—joining the opposition on December 20th and 22nd respectively. In Erickson’s case, the point was made in a manner highly likely to get the attention of members and staff: a suggestion that the left and right band together to primary any incumbent who supported this monstrosity, including staunch RedState allies like Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn, a vocal SOPA supporter in the House.

In late December and early January, SOPA and PIPA went from an issue of interest to “stakeholders” to one of intense interest to constituents. And this made all the difference in how members of Congress reacted.

Source:
Topsy.com

The initial House hearing and the markup were action-forcing events that drove spikes in public and social media attention. But after the markup on December 15th and 16th, with Congress in recess, events acquired a momentum of their own. The markup, combined with the buildup to the Senate vote, triggered a categorical shift up in the volume of attention. The next big spike, the planned boycott of GoDaddy (which had issued statements supportive of the bills), came two days before Christmas and arose entirely from the community.

The idea of an Internet blackout was first seriously floated in a CNET story on December 29th. And it was one of the industry’s leading lobbyists, Markham Erickson, who was quoted in the story, lending added credibility to the report.

January 18th was not initially blackout day. It was actually conceived as the day SOPA opponents would get the hearing they were denied by Lamar Smith two months earlier.

As Congressional staff trickled back to their desks in the first week of January, they were coming to grips with the magnitude of what had happened over the holiday break. Monday, January 9th saw a small burst of Hill activity, with Darrell Issa’s office announcing a hearing before the full Government Oversight Committee on the DNS blocking provisions in SOPA. The hearing would gather some of the most influential anti-SOPA voices from the business community: Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, and reddit’s irrepressible co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Reddit’s involvement in the hearing is what turned the blackout from a source of speculation into reality. The day after the hearing was announced, reddit posted about their plans to their blog. “Stopped they must be; on this all depends,” was the title. On January 18th,
reddit.com
would shut down from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and in part given over to a live-stream of Issa’s hearing.

As would happen numerous times over the coming days, things acquired such momentum that they kept going even when their initial impetus was gone. Now firmly on the defensive, Lamar Smith and Patrick Leahy had begun to suggest they would cave on the bill’s key provisions, including the content industry’s Holy Grail, DNS blocking.

The events of January 13th, a Friday, were a body blow to both SOPA and PIPA. In the Senate, Republican supporters of the bill had issued their letter urging Reid to go slow. In the House, Lamar Smith would announce that DNS blocking would now be removed from SOPA. As with his Manager’s Amendment in December, this did nothing to slow the momentum behind the opposition, but it was one of two factors which led Issa to postpone his planned January 18th hearing.

That Friday night, Issa issued the press release effectively declaring SOPA’s death in the House. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, intervened to dampen SOPA’s movement through the House, assuring Issa that no bill would move to the floor without broad consensus from Republicans—which SOPA clearly lacked. Issa’s statement read, in part:

Issa’s statement spoke to a real sense that the Internet had focused too much energy on killing the House bill, while the content industry’s clearest path to victory lay in sneaking the less objectionable PIPA through the Senate. At a basic level, this is seen in the Twitter traffic, which mentioned SOPA at far higher rates than PIPA. Early on, there was some concern from organizers on our side that the grassroots wouldn’t get the message, allowing PIPA to sneak through. The community, though, pivoted hard towards PIPA and Senate action in the final days.

On Saturday morning, activists awoke to the news of a White House statement opposing the bills in their current form. Numerous SOPA/PIPA-related petitions on the White House’s We the People website had reached a minimum threshold of twenty-five thousand needed for an official response. And when that response came, it seemed strategically calculated to bring the runaway train to a screeching halt. At this point, only the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate had any plans to take up the issue, and a White House statement served as a strong signal that the President had no intention of signing an election year bill that would alienate an increasingly important constituency, the tech community.

The next day, Reid was compelled to address the issue on Meet the Press, biding his time and talking up the prospect of further compromise. Reid’s statement exemplified how legislative talk could so often be detached from facts on the ground. First, he suggested that California’s Dianne Feinstein, a PIPA cosponsor who nonetheless had barely uttered a word about it, was serving as a sort of emissary between the two great industries in her state. He then expressed hope for a Manager’s Amendment from Leahy that would make the bill palatable to all sides. Yet, neither side saw compromise as a possibility. Defenders of the bill had been totally cowed by this point, thus the talk of compromise, but the reality is that both sides saw this as an all-or-nothing fight-to-the-death, one that the Internet was now winning. And the most likely outcome was no bill.

At midnight eastern time on January 18th, Google, Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla, Wired, the Huffington Post, and thousands of other websites went dark or carried some prominent acknowledgement of the historic blackout. And Wikipedia, often one of the top search results on Google, became the biggest site yet to urge its readers to contact Congress directly.

The effect was immediately felt. That morning, countless members of Congress took to their websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds to announce their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. In the Senate, freshmen Republicans were among the first to announce their opposition, including Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and Marco Rubio of Florida, a key PIPA co-sponsor. Though new opposition that day was overwhelming, there seemed to be a Republican tilt to the early announcements. By 3 p.m., 26 of the 29 new opponents of the bills were Republicans.

A word cloud of blackout day statements from U.S. Senators and Representatives, as quoted by ProPublica’s SOPA Opera project.

The blackouts were not the final word. Proponents were shaken, but determined to forge a compromise, still not realizing that no bill named SOPA or
PIPA, or of the same genre, could ever pass—even without DNS blocking. In Washington, the process of haggling, of back-and-forth, of amending, was how you got things done. Yet the process over the last year had been so broken that scrapping the bills was now the only acceptable outcome for the online community.

The prospect of a vote on January 24th lingered on for a day after the blackout. Senator Jon Kyl, the Republican whip from Arizona, was working with Leahy in an attempt to broker a compromise. Even with the other Republicans on Judiciary jumping ship, Kyl’s efforts had emboldened Reid to keep the process going. Finally, on the evening of January 19th, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, issued a statement urging Reid to withdraw the bill from consideration. On the morning of January 20th, this statement came from Reid’s office: