By David Segal

The Geeks are ascendant in the halls of Capitol Hill. After a decade or two of know-nothing dominance of political dialogue, people who, you know, know things, are finally having their piece. During a hearing last week on the far-reaching, technically complex Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Congressman Jason Chaffetz admonished his colleagues to “bring the nerds in and get this right.”

The grassroots activist group Demand Progress – which I helped start about a year ago and has since grown to nearly a million members – has helped lead the fight against SOPA, moving hundreds of thousands of constituent contacts to Congress, organizing activists and techies to fight the bill, and meeting with legislators and folks in the White House to express our members’ concerns.

SOPA would give the government new powers to shut down websites that are accused of facilitating copyright infringement. All of the Web’s best sites – especially the social networks that rely on user-generated content and make the Web fun and politically relevant – could fall victim to such claims.

The bill would stifle innovation and kill jobs, undermine cybersecurity, censor the Internet and provide comfort to regimes that want to crack down on Internet freedoms to undermine dissent. It’s being backed by the big media conglomerates, and opposed by libertarians on the left and the right, human rights advocates, technologists, Web and tech entrepreneurs, and millions of Americans who just use the Internet on a regular basis. Most strikingly, several big websites have, for the first time, mobilized their users to take a political action – the social network/blogging site Tumblr drove 86,000 phone calls to Congress in a single day last month.

SOPA has put the spotlight on most lawmakers’ utter lack of understanding of the importance of the Internet, or how it works – largely just a function of the fact that most lawmakers are too old to have grown up with the Internet.

As one author put it – it’s no longer OK to not know how the Internet works:

Whether it was George W. Bush referring to “the internets” or Senator Ted Stevens describing said internets as “a series of tubes,” we would sit back and chortle at our well-meaning but horribly uninformed representatives, confident that the right people would eventually steer them back on course. Well I have news for members of Congress: Those days are over.

Well … perhaps the nerds haven’t quite arrived just yet: As Congressman Mel Watt put it at last week’s hearing on SOPA, “As one who acknowledged in his opening statement that he was not a nerd and didn’t understand a lot of the technological stuff, I’m not the person to argue about the technology part of this.” Seconds later he proclaimed that he just didn’t believe the dozens of technicians who argue that SOPA would undermine Internet security – and who never had a chance to testify before the committee.

But at least the cool kids finally know that the geeks exist. And Watt’s comments spurred the first “I’m a Geek and I’m proud” fundraising solicitation I’ve ever seen, from Washington state congressional candidate Darcy Burner:

I was given my first computer at the age of 13. My family couldn’t afford to buy any software, so I wrote it myself. At Harvard, I earned a degree in computer science with a special field of economics….I think its time we had a few more nerds in Congress. I hope you agree by contributing.

As the bill achieves greater prominence, and as millions of rank-and-file YouTubers and gamers and bloggers and programmers become politicized for the first time, countless politicians could benefit by learning how to harness this emerging force.

We’re clearly starting to turn a corner – the House Judiciary Committee adjourned without taking the anticipated vote on the bill on Tuesday, likely pushing a vote into next year. But the fight’s been under-covered by the mainstream media, as the major media conglomerates are the brunt of the force behind the legislation. We’ve heard scuttlebutt that hosts on the cable news networks are worried that they’ll be disciplined if they cover the issue.

Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is threatening a cloture vote in late January. That’s unfortunate, but in some ways we’re lucky: It’s incredibly rare to have a month’s foreknowledge that a U.S. Senate vote is on its way, and we can use that to focus the public’s attention and mobilize constituents to contact Congress.

I’ll start here and now: If Senator Jack Reed’s office is reading, I’d like to, first off, thank him for not jumping the gun on this issue; he’s wisely not yet taken a stand on the bill. The growing discontent with SOPA among cybersecurity experts should be of particular concern to anybody with a focus on national security issues – Sandia National Laboratories recently wrote to Congress to express concern that the measures prescribed by the legislation would “negatively impact U.S. and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality.” Please take a close look as the bill approaches a vote this winter.

David Segal is executive director of Demand Progress and was a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011.

Ted Nesi will return on Wednesday, Dec. 28.