My God, will they have to ban Tumblr?

The internet is for porn--unless you live in Egypt. Reuters reports that the nation's public prosecutor has announced that, in response to a 2009 court ruling, the nation is now required to block pornographic websites.

Somewhere, Rick Santorum just perked up his ears in interest.

Reuters says:

Prosecutor Abdel Maguid Mahmoud ordered government authorities "to take the necessary measures to block any corrupt or corrupting pornographic pictures or scenes inconsistent with the values ​​and traditions of the Egyptian people and the higher interests of the state."

Frankly, that could be anything from Kink.com to Victoria's Secret. And please note that he doesn't specify what those "necessary measures" are. Presumably the headache that is actual enforcement will fall to the country's poor telecommunications minister, who recently complained of the technical difficulties in enacting such a ban.

Maybe Mr. Mahmoud should've taken a moment to consider the example of America's war on weed. As the Electronic Freedom Frontier put it in a statement opposing the move, "Censorship circumvention software is about to become very popular in Egypt."

Just goes to show that government officials making ill-informed policies for the internet knows no borders.

The titillating cartoon in question. (Photo: Mick Stevens, The New Yorker)

Despite what those skimpy bikini pics in your news feed might indicate, Facebook has really been cracking down on nudity recently. Even camel toes are inappropriate now! But what about cartoon imagery? Surely line-drawn naked bodies are art, are they not?

Actually...not. Turns out Facebook has become so prudish that they temporarily banned the New Yorker's official page because one of its cartoons was deemed too racy.

According to The New Yorker, they were banned from Facebook for posting a Mick Stevens cartoon that depicts a naked Adam and Eve with their nipples--just two sets of plain black dots--showing. But even naked biblical characters or artistically rendered depictions of female nipples (male nipples are A-O.K.) are against Facebook's rules.

New Yorker Facebook commenters are rightly outraged: "Women have boobs. Boobs have nipples. Grow up and move on!" wrote one named Ben Mixter.

Ross Thompson had another explanation. "It's all because Mark Zuckerberg had so much trouble getting laid in college," he wrote. "Everything Facebook has done since then flows from that."

Hmm, maybe he's on to something--Aaron Sorkin, is that you?

Stone cold grillin'. (Photo: flickr.com/alisdair)

It's July 4th, which means you are either at a barbecue, planning to go to a barbecue later, or desperately searching for a barbecue to crash. However, the limited availability of green space and roof decks means you're likely to find yourself in a situation that requires small talk with strangers. To that end, we've selected a few thematically appropriate conversation starters.

1. Russia's parliament is considering creating an Internet blacklist for sites featuring “banned pornography, drug ads and promoting suicide or extremist ideas.” Certain elements of the U.S. Congress might try, but our all-American legislative gridlock isn't likely to let it get far.

2. The European parliament gives ACTA the thumbs-down. Freeeeedom!

3. However, thanks to a recent injunction, you will not be free to buy Samsung's Galaxy Nexus phone here in the good old U.S. of A. If the party gets boring, we recommend springing this one on an Apple fanboy.

4. So, just how bad can we expect cyber attack fallout to be? More importantly: How will the Hollywood of 2076 make its Dirty Dozen-style take on a hypothetical mid-century cyber war exciting?

5. France is investigating Microsoft for tax fraud. What would the marquis de Lafayette think?

5. Andy Griffith. Get nostalgic for a time before Twitter. Or, alternatively, envision Mayberry with technology. We'll start: Can you imagine the trouble Barney Fife would cause with a few Facebook tips?

Warning for dissidents at the Happy Dragon.

Yesterday, China's authoritarian government unveiled yet another set of restrictions that might soon be levied on Internet users. In a document prepared by the National Internet Information Office (a division of China's "powerful" State Council), the authorities proposed forcing users to register with their official ID card before they can log on to the country's microblogging sites, which are called "weibo" in China. The new rule would also require an official ID for "all the blogs and online forums," says PC World.

As Reuters notes, the country has been escalating censorship of Internet users over the past few months as the country gets ready for a leadership transition, which happens once a decade.

In the past, China has censored content by deleting posts or blocking sites that publish government critiques. Authorities have even detained citizens for allegedly spreading rumors. But despite the restrictions, the country's microblogging scene is "boisterous," says Reuters. Sites like Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have been used to "voice controversial opinions and expose sensitive news," adds PC World. Both have more than 300 million registered users.

The policy might tricky to enforce, however, and designed more to shift liability to the sites themselves. "I'm not sure that the government wants to be drastic," Duncan Clark, chairman of consultancy firm BDA China told PCWorld. "I think they want to hang this over the heads of the companies and use it to pressure them into compliance."

Betabeat just returned from a glorious 10-day tour around Eastern China ourselves. And most of the citizens/ex-pats we ran into used VPNs to easily skirt restrictions on Facebook and Twitter. Locals told us the authorities were quick to shut down the two services after the Arab Spring. Indeed, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, political unrest in the Middle East prompted the Chinese government to start requiring shops that offer free Wifi to install web monitoring software.

The new restrictions are still in proposal phase. Reuters says that the draft is "open for public comment" until July 6th. We're guessing that requires an ID card too.

Zuck says be relevant or else. (flickr.com/gpaumier)

Tech startup personality and Rackspace Internet talking guy (seriously, what do you call Mr. Scoble, anyway?) Robert Scoble inadvertently ran afoul of Facebook's vast, hydra-headed Cthulhu-armed cyber-nannyism today. This is news on a Saturday in early May:

...Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents.

But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message...

The message stated Mr. Scoble's comment seemed "irrelevant or inappropriate" and would not be posted. If he wanted to post future comments, he would need to "make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way."

Mr. Scoble's comment couldn't be more innocuous:

I'm so glad I didn't start a media business. It's actually really tough to get new and interesting stories and to avoid falling into drama. People forget that Techcrunch was built step-by-step as a new publishing form was taking shape. PandoDaily doesn't have that advantage and, is, indeed, facing competition from social networks that is quite good indeed.I no longer visit blogs. I watch Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, along with Hacker News, Techmeme, Quora. These are the new news sources.

Plus, Pando Daily actually doesn't have enough capital to compete head on with, say, D: All Things Digital or The Verge, both of which are expanding quickly and have ecosystems behind them.

As TechCrunch notes, there is a positive side to Facebook's efforts to combat obscenity and trolling, but this seems bizarre. Comments on Mr. Scoble's Google+ page indicate some of his followers there believe his error was in mentioning Google+.

Facebook has yet to comment on the situation.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble replies with an update as to what may have happened in the comments at the bottom of this post.

Retroshare screengrab

Arrests, shutdowns of established file-sharing sites like Megaupload and legislation such as S.O.P.A. have driven users to seek a new breed of file-sharing destination. File-sharers are looking for security and privacy and they may have found it with newer solutions such as RetroShare and Tribler.

Naturally, since governments the world over are actively pursuing shutting down file-sharing in a variety of ways, anonymity and a lack of censorship are highly prized. TorrentFreak has more on why these and other options are gaining in popularity:

[There] are more file-sharing tools that are specifically built to withstand outside attacks. Some even add anonymity into the mix. RetroShare is such a private and uncensored file-sharing client, and the developers have also noticed a significant boom in users recently.

The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

RetroShare, according to TorrentFreak, is "a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders." RetroShare's founder, comfortingly named "DrBob," said that downloads of his 6-year-old client have "massively shot up" in recent months. The downloads were apparently directly tied to interest in S.O.P.A. and also the February disabling of cyberlockers such as RapidGator. DrBob also told TorrentFreak that RetroShare is completely uncensored,  "A network that allows you to use any pseudonym, without insisting on knowing your real name."

"Darknet" may not be the wisest way to describe RetroShare--Anonymous has an Operation Darknet in play that's taken down multiple  child porn sites. If they begin targeting the kind of anonymity tool they might also prize, it could cause a rip in the Anonymous Up-time Continuum.

Oregon State Capitol, Salem (Oregon State University archive photo | flickr.com)

A proposed Oregon law that could have criminalized tweets about Occupy Wall Street has died in committee due to public outcry.

State senate bill 1534 would have made illegal the "use of electronic communication to solicit two or more persons to commit [a] specific crime at [a] specific time and location." The now-dead bill would have carried penalties for using Twitter, Facebook, etc. to call on others to engage in criminal activity as severe as the punishment for actually committing the act.

Oregon State Sen. Doug Whitsett, the chief sponsor of the bill, said he was targeting "flash mob crimes," in which many people descend on a specific location at a specific time to commit a crime, a scenario that was actually not completely made up: a "mob" of four people who "may be using some of the social media such as Facebook and Twitter to schedule an event if you will" robbed a Victoria's Secret in Georgetown last summer, and gang members in New York reportedly used Twitter to coordinate the annual "Crips Holiday."

But criminals could hypothetically use Twitter to coordinate the robbery of a shoe store, Sen. Whitsett said, by way of example. "It's almost impossible to anticipate, almost impossible to stop and almost impossible to prosecute."

That would have made the contents and timbre of tweeted communication related to the largely peaceful Occupy Wall Street protest illegal, as calls for "direct action" to "shut down the corporations" or "occupy Zuccotti Park" would be crimes under the bill, users on Reddit and Twitter pointed out.

"SB1534 is yet another egregious attempt to suppress the organization of activism on the internet and generally criminalize the populace of Oregon," said one Reddit user with the handle "maxp," who posted a copy of a message he sent to state senator Chip Shields.

No one from the Oregon American Civil Liberties Union testified, although Beck Straus, legislative director of the ACLU of Oregon, said they "had some concerns." Sen. Whitsett said many of the people who did testify against the bill seemed to be part of the Occupy movement.

When Betabeat asked the Republican senator what he thought about concerns raised about the impact of this legislation on protest activities, he said the Oregon Legislative Council had declared that the language was not overly broad and that the only other way to write the bill would be to either individually enumerate the crimes covered or explicitly enumerate and exempt crimes that would not be covered.

The bill was not intended to impact peaceful demonstrations or civil disobedience, Sen. Whitsett said, comparing the solicitation of a crime to attempting to hire a contract killer. He repeatedly emphasized the fact that the state would have to prove "willful intent" to successfully prosecute the crime.

The bill was picked up on Twitter by Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous and ultimately died without a floor vote due to testimony and massive outcry from the public. "Given some of the concern that has been expressed... if I or anyone else introduced that bill again it would probably have certain omissions," Sen. Whitsett said.

DAVID KARP DOESN'T SEEM LIKELY FOR POLITICS. When the Tumblr founder and CEO explains what happened over the weekend, he speaks about it in his typically blazing conversational speed, a full paragraph at a time, with the intensity of someone who's been sequestered on a coding project for the last three days:

"Basically," he blasts off, "we had this gathering of the internet in our office, we had seventy people and a bunch of politicians on the phone"—and then pulls back to divest himself of credit—"though we didn’t organize the effort, it was the Demand Progress guys. We just put them up in our office, where we had forty-plus people around. We were in here all day on Saturday. We basically showed up to just say, 'hey, anything we can develop we’ll help develop, in direct communication with dozens of people,' and basically all of these founders and people in tech companies are standing by following all this,'" and by 'this,' Mr. Karp is referring to a piece of legislation going through Congress—"developing, working to figure out how they can seed it in their communities—propagate it—and get it out there. We literally just finished the copy, we had our team of engineers help build it."

And yesterday morning, these efforts went live, the center of which was a quirky, live collage of user-submitted photos from those with jobs in the tech/online platform entitled I Work For The Internet that provoked the call to Mr. Karp. That was at the beginning of the day.

Less than 24 hours into its existence, the site has already provoked a decent amount of curiosity, amusement, and—like anything else on the Internet—some criticism and meta-enabling, like a Gawker post lampooning the message, and a VICE post about how Gawker fell for their trolling prank on the site.

It also happens to be the product of some of the most deeply-ingrained footsoilders of Silicon Alley, who came together in all-weekend marathon thinktank and coding session for what might be one of the most bracing and cohesive American policy problems Silicon Alley has faced as an industry, and their first step towards fighting one together, too. The startups of New York City don't usually find themselves embroiled in politics, unless, of course, it's in a (bipartisan) manner with which the ingenious of their own platforms can be further brought to light. Yet, to say that they have some skin in the SOPA fight is a massive understatement. 

Tumblr's New York City offices—where the weekend-long, late-night session was held—is quite the fitting setting. After all, if Silicon Alley loses this fight, the entirety of Tumblr could be shut down for hosting anything from a beloved music blog like SexMusic to a beloved Ryan Gosling blog like Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, a bipartisan effort powered by the packed wallets of Hollywood lobbyists, is an effort to curb illegal distribution of their product by way of an Internet Kill Switch: If a website is accused of hosting pirated content, it can be shut down, sight-unseen, without due process. Orwellian and fantastically dreamed as it may sound, it's actually being debated in Congress for a vote over the next week.

The implications of this legislation being passed are what the thinktank-yielded website—or trifecta of sites (I Work For The Internet, Trust Nerds, and Fight For The Future)— aims to explain. By distilling the result of SOPA's passage into simple voting issues and a user-friendly way to act on them, those helping fight SOPA hope to give it the kind of viral, accessible resonance that might yield political action.

Mr. Karp takes another breath, but this time, and slightly slower, he speaks emphatically: "We really working to understand the process and the legislation right now. We were really just discussing what we could do to get behind this." With words like that, maybe his political future isn't so cloudy after all.

"TURNOUT WAS REALLY GOOD. You know, like, New York Tech Company people, for the most part." Six days into his new job, Tumblr's new Vice President, Andrew McLaughlin—a former White House staffer who was President Obama's deputy chief technology officer, which followed a four-year stint as Google's global policy wonk—is already talking politics. He's rattling off (albeit, with some struggle) the names of all of those who were in attendance over the weekend, when the aforementioned Silicon Alley heavy hitters came up with the concept, design, and execution of an attempt at activism-by-meme, as a stance against the highly-controversial sum-of-all-fears legislation that is SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, currently being pushed through Congress this week.

"Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures were there, um," he continues, "people from Etsy, Kickstarter, Reddit, Foursquare..people from some of the Betaworks companies, so like, Chartbeat, I think Beatworks itself, Social Flow. We didn't actually pass around an attendance sheet, and this was actually the first time I met them, so I'm sort of shitty on the names, but," he finishes, "it was a real slice of the startup crowd in New York City."

Awareness of the legislation has rocketed over the last few weeks, but even when Tumblr previously took action to put their foot in the ground on SOPA, the primary focus was the threat of censorship, a looming political threat most Americans don't fret over conspiratorially. After all, it is protected by the first—and not, say, the nineteenth—amendment. SOPA advocates needed something stronger, and the legislation more than gives them that fight.

"We didn’t want to repeat what we did last time," Tumblr editorial director Mark Coatney explains, recalling Tumblr's 'blackout' initiative, "but at the same time, everything that we’ve heard from the feedback from that is that the only thing congressional staffers respond to are the phone calls to their office. After that it was: 'How can we hit the other aspects of the bill?'"

Hence, the newest efforts. For example, on the jobs front, Mr. McLaughlin suggests that the United States—ever-proficient in creating platform companies like eBay, Amazon, Google, Dropbox, and say, Tumblr—could have job-creation threatened by an act that places liability for these platforms' content on the platforms instead of the users, as they traditionally have. "The rules up until now have been very straightforward. So long as you’re not the one who’s not the author, as long as you act quickly to take things down when they’re infringing copyright, let’s say, then you’re not liable for what users did."

The threat SOPA presents is that domains like Tumblr would be responsible for what its users do. "Let’s say Canada and the European Union maintain the principle of intermediary liability. We think there’s a real danger that increased compliance costs on U.S. businesses will make us less competitive, and people in other parts of the world will be more competitive. If you make it much more expensive to be an American internet company, then that’s going to be to the benefit of other countries."

Silicon Alley hits the political presses, snazzy logos and all.

This potential for this to go wrong in other ways, it should be noted, could hit Mr. McLaughlin's new home especially hard. "[SOPA] has real implications for, let’s say, Tumblr, where we’ve got 35 million blogs, every single one of them has a unique third-level URL under Tumblr.com. Under the bill as it’s written, the threat is that one bad apple means they could get cancellation of Tumblr.com the domain name, killing everyone’s blog. We don’t think that’s what people intend, we don’t think that’s what they want the result to be, but we look at the language of the bill…and the use of this very clumsy tool of domain cancellation, that’s what we see as a possibility."

But why shouldn't domains be responsible for their content? After all, Hollywood and what it produces is, over the last century, one of America's most consistent exports. Mr. McLaughlin volleys this back without thinking: "[Domains] aren't engaged in the infringement. They’re not doing it. They’re not the criminals. If two people plan a crime using the telephone system, you don’t indict the phone company for connecting the call. If you want these platforms to thrive, you can’t impose liability for every one of the literally billions of transactions that runs over their system every day," he takes a breath, and then drives again:

"The second point is this justice point, which is just simply: They’re not doing the infringement. When you put those two together, it just so happens, the traditional techniques of law enforcement are what we should be using. The number of kind of like commercial scale copyright infringement mills is—by Hollywood’s own estimate—somewhere in the low tens. To inflict an entirely new liability regime and to break secure DNS to go after a couple of dozens of sites is crazy!"

The other two sites—Trust Nerds, which advocates against the dismantling of DNS upgrades that would be waylaid by any stripe of Internet Kill Switch and attempt to circumvent it, and American Censorship, which advocates against the potential for SOPA to be abused by redaction-happy corporate or bureaucratic forces lacking the best intentions—make up the remainder of the political tech power push. "When it became clear that those were the three narratives to hit," Mr. Karp concludes, "we decided to go with 'Fight for the Future,' which was the original SOPA setup, and then decided to make that the hub for all the stuff we now use to host that call to action."

And on Monday, it was done...With exception to a few coding errors, of course, the likes of which received personal adjustment from Mr. Karp after reading about them on Hacker News boards. For a first foray into political activism by Silicon Alley at-large, it's undeniably coherent and impressive, regardless of what some may think of the message (it certainly stands in stark opposition to that other viral political movement, Occupy Wall Street, whose criticisms of 'But what does it stand for?' have all but been totally answered herein, and then some).

Yet, if strong national opposition to the face-value injustices of Wall Street banks experiences news-cycle setbacks in the simple dismantling of sit-in protests, are the lofty ambitions of fighting SOPA realistic? In other words: If you can barely get someone to call their representative for that, is all this effort be for naught?

"We’re not under any illusions. I’ve been around D.C. long enough," Mr. McLaughlin says, sounding like someone who has, in fact, been around D.C. long enough. "We’re not under any illusions that this isn’t some magical counter to decades of investment and relationships and political campaigns and lobbyists and so forth that pro-SOPA people have made. It’s not like this is, you know, a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-moment where lots of calls come in and suddenly everyone drops what they’re doing and we magically win the debate. We’re not that grandiose as to think this is going to work like that." He concludes that this is the kind of fight those with dogs in it—and those who want to help—we need to get used to, and now is as good a time as any to start:

"For this battle and for future battles down the road, people who care about the Internet need to get in the habit of letting their representatives know they care about the Internet. The Internet isn’t just a force of nature that happens, it’s something that’s built. It’s built by humans and regulated by governments, and the people who care about it need to be sufficiently vocal."

"Maybe," he says, "some good will come out of it.”

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Peter Kafka from All Things D Tweeted out tonight:

NDAs required at YouTube NYC Xmas party at the YouTube Next Lab on 21st and 5th. Srsly.

And then Instagrammed the picture! Like so:

Yeah, this will go so well. Between FourSquare, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, surely, nobody will disclose anything that happened at the Google/YouTube Christmas party for fear of litigation. Hey! DJ Steve Porter! Tell us all about it! One more time, for those who don't know what a company holiday party is like:

People + Alcohol * Otherwise Latent Sense of Mischief Waiting To Explode/Oppressive Nondisclosure Agreement + Reporters = What Will, God Willing, Be A Social Media Shitshow In Less Than A Few Hours.

Oh, our search terms are queued up. They most certainly, definitely are.

UPDATE: Kafka singed his NDA as Fred Flintsone. Journalists! We hate your NDAs. Here's to him getting everyone there drunk and saying very incriminating things about working for YouTube and/or Google.

Image via The Guardian

Tumblr’s 32.5 million users woke up last week to a vision of a dystopian future. ““WTF,” a frustrated fashionista working on her own startup wrote to Betabeat. “I can’t see any of my god damn archives. UGGGGHHH.”

Logging in to their dashboards, where they browse the stream of posts from the blogs they follow, users were greeted with text and images that were blacked out like the redacted sections of a classified briefing.

Those obscured blogs represented Tumblr’s take on American Censorship Day, a protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was going before a hearing of the Congressional Judiciary Committee that afternoon. The bill would allow companies to sue service providers like Tumblr or Facebook for hosting content like copyrighted music files or movies, a big reversal from the safe harbor provisions which had long defined internet piracy law.

The startup community, both entrepreneurs and the investors who back them, had been raising the alarm for several weeks about their concerns that this bill would cripple their ability to innovate and damage the internet economy. But if SOPA was the first real test of the political muscle of the entrepreneurs and small-business owners who are driving the tech sector, it was a test they would fail. Whether SOPA eventually becomes law or not, the issue provided a clear illustration to many in the startup world that they may be frighteningly unprepared to navigate the dangerous waters of Capitol Hill, where buttonholing trumps beta-testing and hard-nosed lobbying beats “likes.”

“We’ve got all these blogs and these Twitter followers, but when it comes to politics, I worry that we’re the tree falling in the wood and nobody is hearing us,” said Fred Wilson, New York’s most prominent venture capitalist and an outspoken opponent of the SOPA bill.

Mr. Wilson and his partner Brad Burnham had travelled to D.C. recently to put in face time with Senators and members of Congress. But he worries that talk is cheap, and the startup community won’t be able to wield much influence until it begins working through D.C.’s more traditional channels. “We’re outmanned and outgunned by the older, more mature industries,” he explained. “The startup community is beginning to find its voice, but we don’t have a PAC or lobbyists.

“When the startup industry has more friends in Congress and when we are giving more money, then we will have more say. But so far we have not had a lot of success.”

SOPA would essentially reverse the conditions set out by Congress in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1997. That legislation gave companies like Youtube and Facebook protection under “safe harbor.” If someone uploaded a copyrighted television show or music file to one of these sites, the copyright owner can file a claim to have it taken down. As long as these sites respond in a timely fashion, they were considered to have done their part.

Under the SOPA act, companies and the government have the new ability to force internet service providers, giants like AT&T and Verizon, to block access to certain domain names if those sites are thought to be hosting pirated content. It would also give copyright holders the ability to sue search engines, blogs and forums if they contain links to this copyrighted material. It would give corporations a powerful enforcement mechanism, by making it possible for them to demand that advertising networks and payment processors stop doing business with offending sites.

- - SOPA Opera: The Craziest Congressional Quotes About Online Piracy >>

Mr. Wilson’s concern that opponents of the bill would go unheard turned out to be unfounded. Tumblr users who clicked on the redacted text they saw on America Censorship day were taken to a screen encouraging them to call Congress and protest. Tumblr is better known as a home for hilarious cat animations and underground mixtapes than a hotbed of political activism. But its irate users placed an astonishing 87,834 calls to Congress in the next 12 hours, averaging at one point 3.6 calls per second.

The internet was practically howling. A petition posted to the White House website from a user on Reddit quickly gathered more than 40,000 signatures. “This Bill would essentially allow a Great Firewall of America and would be a shameful desecration of free speech and any sort of reasonable copyright law,” it read. “Essentially it's a censorship law that would end the Internet as we know it in America.”

But while the members of the House Judiciary Committee heard these voices loud and clear, they seemed more amused and annoyed than alarmed at the vast and vocal outcry. “To those who say that a bill to stop online theft will break the Internet, I would like to point out that it’s not likely to happen,” Rep. John Conyers (D.-Michigan) noted with a dry chuckle, at the opening of Wednesday’s SOPA hearing. “We’re getting a number of reactions from those in the tech sector who think this will strangle startups.”

The strident voices of Boing Boing and Hacker News seem to have backfired. This wasn’t the slick talk of K Street lobbying firms or the prepared testimony of well-heeled industry groups. It was the rage of Reddit, eventually boiling over into the mainstream press. To the Congressmen who crafted this legislation, it came across as childish and suspect.

Rep. Conyers pulled out a sheet of paper with an image of Godzilla on the front. “I reluctantly ask to put this into the record,” he said. “The attack of the internet killers. This is serious business. Don’t walk, run, tell Congress SOPA hreatens internet security.”

Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) interjected. “Isn’t that a comic?”

“No this is serious,” Rep. Conyers replied, laughing. “We ought to know better.”

It was exactly the reaction many in the startup community had feared. “These are people and companies with incredibly large and engaged networks of users,” Anil Dash said, dressed in a black overcoat, black pants and black shoes, sipping a chai tea and chatting with Betabeat at the SunBurst Cafe not long ago. “But it’s not clear that having this big megaphone online will translate into any kind of real political power.”

Mr. Dash recently won a board seat on the New York Tech Meetup, a collection of more than 19,000 members from Silicon Alley, and one of the largest meetup groups in the world. “When Mayor Bloomberg came to our meeting, that made me remember why I was interested in the position. It showed that government was recognizing our power.”

Through Expert Labs, his non-profit, Mr. Dash explores ways for citizens to affect policy through the use of technology. “We need to figure out ways to get more aggressive. Take Nate Westheimer,” Mr. Dash said, referring to the jocular MC of the NY Tech Meetup. “He should be like Al Sharpton, our agitator, making people wake up to what’s important to us.”

The problem for the startup sector is that, while everyone from Mayor Bloomberg to President Obama recognizes their potential to create jobs or become the next Google, they are by definition small, cash strapped strivers, a difficult position from which to find political leverage. This prevents them from engaging the hoards of lobbyists who crafted the language that became the SOPA bill.

- - SOPA Opera: The Craziest Congressional Quotes About Online Piracy >>

And as the committee hearing showed, by the time the issue was opened up for debate, the deck had already been stacked. From the Howard Dean scream to Tony Weiner’s tweet, the Internet has not been kind to politicians. But the opening statements for the SOPA hearing made it clear that the Judiciary committee had strong feelings about the ways in which the Internet was wreaking havoc.

“In my experience there is usually only one thing at stake when we have long lines outside a hearing as we do today, and when giant companies and their supporters start throwing around rhetoric like ‘this bill will kill the internet’ or ‘an attempt to build the Great Firewall of America,’ and that one thing is usually money,”said Rep. Mel Watt (R-NC). “When I hear overblown rhetoric like this bill is a killer to innovation and entrepreneurs, that the co-sponsors of this bill are the internet killers, I become suspicious of the message, as well as the messengers.”

Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California who represents Silicon Valley, tried to defend the impassioned internet activists. “Writing this off as hyperbole is not fair,” she said. It was not the wealthy tech titans who were secretly backing this outrage, she noted, pointing out the many small entrepreneurs, legal and technical experts who opposed SOPA. “It hasn’t generally been the policy of this committee to dismiss the views of those in the industry we intend to litigate. I understand why you’re upset by the rhetoric, but that is not a reason to dismiss these objections.”

Still, the wave of internet based protest did make at least some impact. When Nancy Pelosi was asked via Twitter where she stood on SOPA she responded, “Need to find a better solution than #SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet.” While they couldn't puncture the cloistered walls of the committee hearing, the startup community seemed to have gotten its protest across to at least one important politician, who was embracing both their medium and their message.