Pirate radio to moor at Republican convention
Over the last few years, many political protesters have felt increasingly squeezed by law enforcement authorities, who frequently seek to restrict them to predetermined "free speech zones" and sometimes threaten them with tear gas, rubber bullets or arrest if they stray. Such tactics can lead to innovation, however, and the technologically savvy have found it in the combined use of cellphones, the Internet and low-power radio.
Such know-how will be on display outside the Republican National Convention in New York. Beginning today, RNC protesters plan to use wireless phones to call in live, in-the-trenches reports that will be streamed over the Internet and picked up for rebroadcast nationwide on community-based micro radio stations -- some licensed, most illegal.
"It has become sort of a thing that whenever there's a big protest like this, someone sets up a pirate radio station the same as someone setting up the food truck or the sound system," said Pete Tridish, a longtime activist and founder of the Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project, an advocacy group for legal, noncommercial micro-radio broadcasters. "Someone knows how to start a radio station, and so someone does it."
The use of illegal -- that is, unlicensed -- "pirate" radio stations has a long history of giving voice to the disenfranchised, usually on a very local level because of such outlets' relatively low power (10 to 100 watts) and reach (one to five miles). Only recently has the technology become an integral protest tool, used to organize impromptu events and to provide news, interviews, even music from event sites.
At the "Battle of Seattle," the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting that resulted in riots, curfews, mass arrests and millions of dollars in property damage, radio pirates trekked in from around the country, seeing the WTO gathering as the perfect setting and illegal, low-power FM radio as the ideal medium to protest corporate power and massive media consolidation.
Calling themselves the Voice of Occupied Seattle and operating from a headquarters known as Studio X, the network of seven micro stations held workshops and set up transmitters that were used to coordinate protest activities and broadcast news and views they felt would not get out through traditional media. Some stations disguised their transmitters and antennas in briefcases and umbrellas. Others broadcast from trees. To tune in on the street, activists were urged to BYOB -- bring your own boombox.
