I have a difficult time accepting that as a narrative for what happened to prevent SOPA from becoming law, and am not sure what the implications are for the constellation of topics surrounding privacy and secretive agencies compelling cooperation.

To start of with, (1) I don't think that Google et al were intimidated by users' potential wrath in the face of SOPA passing, and (2) do not think that lobbyists countering those in favor of the legislation had any notable effect.

To the first part, few people said they were threatening to boycott Google or Facebook, and their threats would not have been credible. Additionally, the list of companies who eventually came out against SOPA do not spend very much on lobbying.

SOPA might have been a help to incumbent market participants, because while it would have been feasible for them to implement protections, it would have been an enormous barrier to entry for any new competitors based on user-generated content. So, I agree that it is surprising that they eventually came out against SOPA, and that it may have been for the sake of public relations as much as for sincere ideological compatibility.

And yet, still, many of the most powerful lobbies have influence through the large number of members who follow through when the group decides to send letters expressing outrage about some pet issue as much as from financial power, which is ultimately used for financing ads in attempt to influence people's votes.

Anyway, I'd encourage people to watch one of the talks Aaron Swartz gave on the subject,[1] where he specifically talks about the unprecedented number of calls into Congress and how surprised people on the Hill were about seomthing that seemed to come out of nowhere.

There is no argument that those in favor of SOPA blamed the overwhelming popular reaction on Google and others somehow bamboozling people, but they aren't arguing that it wasn't the popular reaction that mattered. Of course, they also can't explain why Google cared more about SOPA than people who would eventually be the source of that user-generated content that SOPA would block.

Anyway, that's a long way at getting to what may really matter when it comes to privacy and the ability of people to communicate with eachother off-the-record. So far the equation most politicians must see is that they will be blamed whenever a future attack occurs if they stood up against something advocated by people deep in national security.

It would be interesting to see a poll of people who came out against SOPA, since I think it was a pretty nuanced issue. Unfortunately, the value of privacy seems like a pretty nuanced issue as well. In one sense, it doesn't limit you to be patted down in the airport, but it does to have all of your conversations recorded and on record. And yet, the former is the one most likely to upset many people.

While I thought SOPA would prevent innovation on the internet, I think that the repository of communication will become increasingly dangerous as computing power progresses and data analysis methods improve. Since all progress, whether it is sociological or technological necessarily involves change, there will be established powers that have an interest in being able to use that repository to impede progress.

Anyway, I think it is counter productive to achieving public policy aims to treat the hurdles as insurmountable and ignore the successes of popular constituencies of all types. There would be no history because nothing would ever change if everything were the results of infallible puppetmasters.

On a more philosophical level, I suppose the argument to be made is that there will be a lot of change in the future, and that while some disasters will definitely occur, past trends certainly suggest that that things generally improve over time. In other words, even if the shutdown of free, unfettered, unrecorded communication prevented some disasters, it would come at the expense of limiting progress as well once better and better analytics make it a better tool for sabotaging change.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg