Free 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 Page B

people called their senators and representatives to argue their position, they shared their stories online, encouraging others to do the same.
David Segal
    On January 18th 2012 the New York Tech Meetup took the lead, as Demand Progress, and allied groups buttressed their efforts to organize an anti-SOPA rally outside of the midtown tower that houses [Chuck Schumer’s] office. We’d concentrate the movement’s focus on the office of this powerful senator, and provide the press with a 3D spectacle that would serve as an accessible representation of the otherwise abstract online activism. Even the likes of Congressman Mike Quigley’s staffers—who literally didn’t believe how many emails they were receiving—would be forced to contend with the concept that there are, indeed, real, live people who care about these issues. The New Yorker ’s write-up affectionately (and accurately) called it a “Nerd Parade.”
Patrick Ruffini
    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 earlyannouncements. By 3 p.m., twenty-six of the twenty-nine new opponents of the bills were Republicans
David Segal
    The police extended the barriers away from the stage, so they now ran the whole length of the block. Ten minutes later we’d taken over two lanes of midtown, noontime traffic in addition to half of the sidewalk. Then so many people filled the sidewalk that all the police could do was to keep a clear walkway as wide as a couple of concrete panels: there were more than two thousand of us.
    The crowd didn’t quite know what to do: it was easy to catch ambient exclamations along the lines of “this is the first time I’ve ever really protested anything!” These weren’t veteran activists, and nobody had yet invented whatever chants one’s supposed to recite at an Internet rally: this was something new.
Aaron Swartz
    First the Republican senators pulled out. Then the White House issued a statement opposing the bill. Then the Democrats, left all alone, announced they were pulling the bill so they could have a few further discussions before the vote.
Zoe Lofgren
    On January 18th, the Stop SOPA blackout occurred. An estimated seventy-five thousand websites went black in protest. I had my Congressional Web site go dark. Over one hundred sixty-two million people were said to have viewed Wikipedia’s blacked out page. Google put a notice on its famous front page, with a click-through to scholarly analyses of the measures and an easy way to contact Members of Congress. The phone calls started to flood into Capitol Hill offices. All told, an estimated eight million Americans called their representatives and senators to voice their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. The phone meltdown had arrived.
Aaron Swartz
    Wikipedia went black. Reddit went black. Craigslist went black. The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat-out melted. Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill. It was just ridiculous.
    There’s a chart from that time that captures it quite well. It says something like:
    January 14 and then it has this big long list of names supporting the bill, and just a handful of lonely ones opposing it.
    And then: January 15. And suddenly it’s totally reversed—everyone is opposing, with just a few lonely people left in support.
Ernesto Falcon
    By the time January 18th rolled around, even the most dedicated protectors of the MPAA and RIAA scurried away from SOPA and PIPA. I recall warning one staffer weeks before the blackout that the MPAA and RIAA had completely lost the public debate and it would be a