St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, "people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail." It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, "people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized." It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
(Source: “Tyranny on Display at the Republican Convention”, Chris Hedges, Truthdig, September 8th, 2008)
Every year since Presidential Decision Directive 62 was signed into being by President Bill Clinton in May 1998, certain events in the United States are officially designated “National Special Security Events” (NSSEs). This designation tends to be attached to large-scale, national events attended by officials of the United States Government or foreign dignitaries and which have significant national, international or political interest.
Examples of events designated as NSSEs would be economic summits such as those held by the World Trade Organization or the coming 2009 G-20 in Pittsburgh, national political gatherings like the Republican and Democratic national conventions, and large sporting events such as the Superbowl or Olympics.
My first experience with an NSSE was the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC), held between September 1st and 4th in St. Paul, Minnesota. Following years of work developing different areas of the independent media around the world, I co-hosted a variety of independent media from around the country in what became known as “the Indymedia Lounge” during the Convention, and was able to witness first-hand how independent media functions during a large-scale political event.
I didn’t know what to expect. It was an amazing display of security overkill with all the focus in the wrong directions. Following the RNC, I worked with local activists to address various aspects of the aftermath, ultimately creating the RNC ’08 Report, found at http://rnc08report.org.
The RNC ’08 Report is an extensive library comprised from as many textual, audio-visual, and political sources as possible—ranging from an archive of anarchist Twitter feeds during the protests to press releases from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from commercial media TV news reports about the 2008 RNC to full-length independent documentaries made about the events.
The archive exists to offer a publicly-available, browsable and searchable citizen's archive of media reports, government documents, and other resources relating to the 2008 RNC, with over 4,000 page views a month from just under 2,000 visitors. The archive has been updated for the entire year since the Convention, contains over 1,000 items, and includes sections pertaining to other large-scale international political events where protest is expected, such as the G-20s in London in Spring 2009 and Pittsburgh at the end of September 2009.
Over the course of the last year, many of us in the Twin Cities who experienced the 2008 RNC have had many opportunities to discuss the event in great depth with a widening circle of people, progressively uncovering ever-deepening layers of the story, and have had time to ponder the main lessons we have learned—about events like these, in times like this—and time consider what they reveal about our society.
National Special Security Events and security
Perhaps the most significant result of NSSE designation is the subsequent geographic consolidation of federal security power in the city where the event is being held—over a period of several months—accompanied by a massive influx of federal funds to underwrite this extra deployment of both local and national police and security agencies.It is not every day that a city gets to experience this much security attention. Overall security for a National Special Security Event is coordinated by the United States Secret Service. Satellites are re-tasked by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to provide a realtime ‘eye in the sky’ for multiagency command centers that look like NASA Mission Control, with desks seating officials from between 50-80 different security agencies, and representatives from infrastructure providers such as the water, electricity, and cable and cellphone companies.
Security is a vital dimension that unarguably must be addressed with all due diligence as the deadline for an NSSE approaches. With the memory of 9/11 burned into the American consciousness, few are prepared to argue that point.
Yet, despite the presence of real threats, the focus of security implementation has increasingly shifted in practice away from obvious, historically proven threats—whether foreign terrorist cells such as Al-Qai’da, far right militia/supremacist groups such as those which spawned Timothy McVeigh, and lone bombers living in isolated cabins with boxes of typewriter ribbon like Ted Kaczynski—towards superficially more radical elements of the protest community, who pose no real threat to public order.
Usually anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups are the target of the derailed terrorism investigation. Since 9/11, bonuses given to FBI agents for successful convictions have skewed more towards terrorist cases, so the definition of “terrorism” has inevitably been widened to include domestic protest movements.
In St. Paul, eight activists from the “RNC Welcoming Committee” were charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism” for allegedly organizing direct action protest at the Convention. They were arrested by SWAT teams in a series of armed, pre-dawn raids across the Twin Cities before the Convention. A briefing from the Department of Homeland Security sets the tone:
The Republican National Convention-Welcoming Committee (RNC-WC) is an anarchist/anti-authoritarian group that formed in the spring of 2007 in order to disrupt or stop the Republican National Convention (RNC). It is likely that they will target transportation infrastructure surrounding the RNC in an attempt to accomplish their goal.
(Source: “Plans to Target Transportation Infrastructure Surrounding Republican National Convention”, Highway Watch Information Sharing and Analysis Center, Department of Homeland Security, March 27th, 2008)
The charges were laughable to people who knew the activists’ nonviolent history of community service in poor neighborhoods, but deeply unsettling to the progressive community of which they are part.
Ultimately, recognizing that the “terrorism” charges would not fly in court, they were dropped by Ramssey County prosecutor Susan Gaertner. The direct action the “RNC 8” were allegedly ‘planning’—events that ultimately took place while they were in jail—amounted to a 3-4 insignificant street blockades early on Day 1 of the RNC and a march of black bloc protesters which resulted in property damage to three Downtown bank and a chain store windows.
Commercial news media and security agencies greatly exaggerated the impact of the few incidents. Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, architect of the investigation of the RNC Welcoming Committee, warned that the city would have been “destroyed” without his intervention. CCTV footage of the window breaking, which was carried out by 5 people at most at the two locations, is underwhelming.
While there are certainly a large number of people who support the police taking action to prevent property damage, most at least recognize that property damage is not “terrorism”, and additionally need to understand that these ‘investigations’ are never confined to potential window breakers.
You start to realize that your City has gone to the bad place when peace groups are infiltrated. Four months prior to the RNC, the Minneapolis City Pages reported the story of Paul Carroll, a University of Minnesota student who was approached by the FBI:
What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant--someone to show up at "vegan potlucks" throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort's primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division's website, is to "investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines."
(Source: “Moles Wanted: In preparation for the Republican National Convention, the FBI is soliciting informants to keep tabs on local protest groups”, Matt Snyders, City Pages, May 15th, 2008)
‘Briefing’ hysteria into the police
Perhaps one of the most profound elements of the pre-NSSE security hysteria is its effect on the members of the police forces who are going to be conducting crowd management. Prior to the event, the police are ‘briefed’ to expect violence against them from radical segments of the protest community—protesters who cannot be visually differentiated from other protesters.In preparation for an NSSE, police forces are equipped with the latest “less lethal” control technologies by market leader Defense Technologies/Federal Laboratories, and receive riot control training from specialists on military bases. Police are told to expect Molotov cocktails, weapons, and the increasingly popular “urine and feces” to be thrown at them, walk into the situation expecting the worst, and react to normal protest situations with excessive force.
In the case of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN, police were additionally reassured with insurance paid for by the conference organizers which exempted the host city from financial liability in any successful civil legal suits against the police for abuse of power. In St. Paul, what became known as “brutality insurance” indemnified the city up to a maximum of $10 million of claims.
At the 2008 RNC, riot police were visible from the very beginning of the Convention, prior to any disturbances, and the number of riot police routinely deployed was dramatically increased on Day 2, following a handful of Day 1 blockades and window-breaking incidents.
The official City of St. Paul’s Republican National Convention Public Safety Planning and Implementation Review Commission report, released in mid January 2009, stated:
In response to the events of September 1, between that evening and the morning of
September 2, police leadership changed their strategy for dealing with the anarchist threat. [...] Finally, they made the decision to deploy MFF in riot gear in a far more visible way starting on the second day of the convention. All of these changes, made in light of the events of September 1, dramatically increased the police presence and the visibility of police in tactical gear.
(Source: Report of the Republican National Convention Public Safety Planning and Implementation Review Commission, pp 55-56)
This mild summary, from a report written by a panel comprised of ex-Mayors, ex-Police Chiefs, Homeland Security agents, and a businessman who makes his living selling software to the St. Paul Police Department, does not even begin to describe the scene from the streets’ eye view.
During the first two hours of the Poor People's Rally and March during the RNC, in St. Paul's Mears Park on September 2nd, there were only about 200-300 people there, 100 of whom were journalists, legal observers and street medics. There was dancing. Families with children in strollers were present. There was a picnic atmosphere not dissimilar to any of the free music concerts held in the park during the summer months.
The organizing group, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, an initiative started by Martin Luther King shortly before his assassination, is a local organization that has held peaceful protests in the Twin Cities for over a decade. They had a permit for the tiny gathering in a city that last night’s terrifying commercial media reports had transformed into a ghost town.
On the State's side of that tiny, peaceful rally of 200 people, we could see 2 helicopters, 40 riot police, 20 bike police, 6 horse police, members of the National Guard, Secret Service and SWAT, and no doubt numerous undercover police officers. Some of the police were armed with M-16 or M-4 assault rifles. Machine guns, in plain English. There was blatantly no public order imperative for any of this.
Of course, all of this intentionally highly visible riot police presence is intimidating to the general public and cannot help but to create a climate that undermines the Constitutionally-guaranteed rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
The importance of facilitating protest and reporting at NSSEs
Clearly, the prominent national and international political events that are designated NSSEs are potent symbolic locations, where protest of the issues of the day is to be expected, and a free society must especially guard the right of its members to dissent juxtaposed next to such powerful symbols.These events serve as powerful platforms for political speech that will be instantly broadcast around the world. This miracle of technology, of bouncing instant audio and video across the world via satellite—is a miracle owned by private corporations that sell their bandwidth to the highest bidder and their clients, media organizations who sell their airtime to the highest-bidding advertisers, corporations who like their news to be comfortable and popular.
With such great power being exercised by public figures and corporate entities via a medium where mere minutes of visibility are measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is important that all members of the public ensure that the public spaces around these events are places people are free to protest against the machine whose messaging capabilities vastly outnumber theirs.
It is also important that the same members of the public claim those spaces as places where they are free to observe the events happening in their town—in their country—and free to take pictures and shoot video of whatever happens. This is true press freedom. If “reporting” on events is left entirely to corporations whose loyalties lie with other corporations whose interests run contrary to the free flow of information, then the public gets a very stilted, one-sided, and ultimately propagandistic view of what is going on in their world.
Much of the commercial media coverage of the 2008 RNC was shallow (and sometimes disturbing) and ceased investigating or following-up events in any meaningful way within a week of the end of the Convention. Additionally knowing that the commercial media tends to minimize and distort the statements and actions of all shades of protesters, media activists from independent, loosely-organized organizations travel to cities holding NSSEs, in order to keep a record of what happened for their local activist communities.
Some come to report on the protests, and some have very specific goals that have profound implications for the legal defense of those present at the events. One New York-based cop watch organization, i-Witness video, collects and catalogs citizen video shot of police actions at protests. i-Witness’s work ensured that charges were dropped against more than 400 protesters falsely charged at the 2004 RNC in New York.
The regular independent journalists who travel to these events either focus on reporting on, or are directly embedded with the protest community. These journalists—essentially ones who journal—exist for all the important reasons that can be seen in a myriad of oral histories that have preserved the stories of peoples subjected to violence and dispossession, to active suppression of their culture, and to the denial of their historical realities.
Today, these journal-ists do not just have campfire audiences. They have an international media audience, courtesy of the Internet. They have easy-to-update websites based on Content Management Systems, e-mail lists, Twitter feeds, and cell phones.
Direct involvement in that which you seek to document is often dismissed as problematic among those who like to discuss journalistic ethics but, the fact is that sticking to what you know about has always been the first rule of successful writing, and a good writer’s immersion in a subculture, to report on it, remains the best way for a journalist to get to know a situation and for their readers to get to the roots of the story.
It is not sympathy for a cause or subculture that is the fly which taints the ointment of credibility, because every journalist has biases. It is any denial of reality that is the problem. A good journalist doesn’t self censor. A good journalist follows the story to its roots, even if they are not comfortable with what they find, and tells that story.
Leveling charges of ‘bias’ or ‘over-involvement’ at independent media is ludicrous in light of the far more powerful, wider-reaching commercial media, which is an expert at not giving the context and denying basic realities of the situations it reports on. Just browse any commercial media reports on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The overarching context—the daily hell created for Palestinians which is never reported in any proportion to its pervasive destruction—is an Israeli occupation that eats into every single Palestinian’s personal and societal freedom at multiple levels. Every Palestinian under the age of 42—and bear in mind that more than half the population are under 18—has only ever known Israelis as a foreign army that dispossesses them from their land or drags off their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters.
Yet the word “occupation” itself is rarely mentioned in commercial media reports. If a sole Palestinian man plants a bomb in an Israeli cafe, the 42 years of brutal occupation which played a profound role in shaping the circumstances that led him to this act are not mentioned. Canadian writer Margaret Atwood hit the nail on the head when she said, “Context is all” yet the commercial news media regularly pays context no heed. As a result, we are fed shallow, partial accounts of reality that demonize and detract and which are used as the cover for foreign policy and military action towards entire regions.
This failure to set fresh news stories in their often painfully obvious context is one of the most persistent and destructive biases of the corporate media. Therefore, one bottom line, that none of us who presume to ‘report’ should ever let go of—regardless of our status as commercial or independent journalist—is that we must never ever misrepresent context.
We must never minimize the impact of systematic wrongs perpetrated on society and we must never make too much out of something that we know is not a ubiquitous and pervasive pattern. Leaving false histories strewn behind us cannot possibly help the world. To report accurately, we must get out of the way of reality, not try to manage it, filter it, or adjust it.
Targeting journalists
These modern day campfire storytellers, from alternative news organizations such as Indymedia, come to our cities with laptops and cellphones tethered to create “anywhere” Internet connections. They come with digital video cameras and tools available commercially at attainable prices. They come pre-connected to each other and to the protest community with Twitter-to-cellphone news feeds. And they are enormously successful at what they do.Terrorizing Dissent, a 2-hour-long documentary made about the 2008 RNC, utilized first-person accounts and footage from more than forty cameras on the streets during the Convention to recreate the view from the streets and deconstruct the state narrative of direct action protest organizers as “terrorists”. The several terabytes of footage collected during the process of making the documentary was also utilized by legal defense teams.
Power doesn’t like eyewitnesses when it exerts control. Those who work directly with the state, and corporate media which depends on the state’s goodwill for access, often go to great lengths to undermine the credibility of independent journalists.
Prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, three journalists from the New York-based Glassbead Collective, who formed half of the team that made the Terrorizing Dissent documentary, were arrested as they arrived at their host home in town, and had laptops, phones, video and still cameras, and their notes confiscated by the police.
The police who detained and later released them (their work tools were eventually released following considerable protest the following day) refused to both file an official report of the incident or give a receipt for the items taken. They justified conducting the search and seizure under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.
The Minnesota Joint Analysis Center (MNJAC), whose purpose statement affirms that it “recognizes the importance of ensuring the protection of individual constitutional rights, civil liberties, civil rights, and privacy interests throughout the information sharing process” had this to say in its information sharing process about the legitimacy of the reporters arrested:
The filmmakers are all members of New York City-based Glass Bead Collective. It can be expected that other out of state “journalists” [their quotation marks] will be on hand to video document demonstrator events during the RNC.
(Source: “Minneapolis Police Detain and Confiscate Belongings of 3 NY Filmmakers”, Activity Reports, p5, Critical Infrastructure Brief for 29 August 2008, Minnesota Joint Analysis Center)
The next day after the Glassbead Collective journalists were harassed, police raided the St. Paul home where members of i-Witness video were staying, handcuffing them and members of the National Lawyers Guild for several hours before releasing them. During the Convention, police again harassed i-Witness’ office location. The bus that serves as the mobile headquarters of Mobile Broadcast News was also repeatedly harassed during its time in St. Paul, finding its fuel line cut as it attempted to leave town after the Convention. Even weeks after the Convention, members of the Terrorizing Dissent editing team, including members of the Glassbead Collective, were again threatened and harassed by police in St. Paul. They moved their location to the Walker Church in Minneapolis, under a different jurisdiction.
The state does not recognize the legitimacy of independent media, routinely perceives and deals with it as the ‘enemy’, and often resorts to active delegitimization.
In his recent memoir, Cop Book, former Bloomington, MN, policeman and undercover RNC Welcoming Committee investigator Richard Greelis makes the following claims about independent videographers which anyone on the ground during the RNC protests could recognize as false:
Videographers typically left their video cameras in the "off" position during confrontations with police, while protesters surreptitiously pelted the officers with rocks, garbage, excrement, and urine squirted from Super Soakers. When the police finally had enough, and brought out the tear gas and hickory sticks, the cameras started rolling and continued to roll until the last mope was piled into the last police transport. The videographers then turned their cameras off and offered up their video to any of countless sympathetic media outlets covering the event. (A movie, Terrorizing Dissent, released by Glass Bead Collective, et al., was made after the RNC using a compilation of these types of clips.)
(Source: Cop Book, Richard Greelis, Beaver’s Pond Press, June 2009, ISBN: 978-1-59298-282-0)
The January 14th, 2009 Report of the Republican National Convention Public Safety Planning and Implementation Review Commission revealed that there was no clear policy about defining who was considered a member of the media:
Both the media and the SPPD struggled with the question of who was a journalist and whether journalists (however defined) should be afforded some form of special treatment should they find themselves detained or arrested.
(Source: “The Media and the SPPD Security Plan”, Executive Summary, Report of the Republican National Convention Public Safety Planning and Implementation Review Commission, January 14th, 2009)
Our false hope in police common sense
On September 16th, 2009, Pittsburgh City Council voted for a temporary, G-20-driven ordinance that permits police to cite people for possessing PVC pipes, locks, and chains, if they seem to be trying to thwart crowd control.According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on September 16th, at the meeting, Public Safety Director Michael Huss:
...raised the specter of summit protesters creating "sleeping dragons," in which people use pipes, locks, chains and sometimes concrete or other materials to secure themselves in formations that are hard for police to break. City police faced the formation in Lawrenceville in 2007.
"Inside of PVC pipe are their arms, and hands," said Mr. Huss. Using cutting tools on a pipe that contains peoples' limbs is "a big drain on our public safety resources" and "there is inherent danger involved."
He said police can tell the difference between a plumber and a protester.
"No one is trying to stop someone who needs to make a pipe repair from taking PVC pipe Downtown," he said. But if several people with pipes seem to be coming together in a protest hotspot? "We would like to have the police stop them, cite this ordinance, and eliminate the problem before we have to physically remove them."
(Source: “Council OKs limits on items G-20 protesters can use”, Rich Lord, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16th, 2009)
Unfortunately, in the climate of expecting the worst that precedes these events among police and other security forces, it becomes obvious that common sense can and does indeed go out the window, and that the ability to tell “the difference between a plumber and a protester” or whether an object is being used benignly or to “thwart crowd control”, becomes a strangely insurmountable challenge.
The Pittsburgh Business Times reported the following day, on September 17th, 2009, that this had happened with one local company—not once, but twice—:
Pittsburgh police on Thursday temporarily confiscated some PVC pipes from a Pittsburgh company that was using them for product testing, fearing the pipes were tools for G-20 protesters.
It was the second time RedZone Robotics Inc., based in the city's Lawrenceville neighborhood, has seen authorities confiscate their pipes. The company makes water pipe inspection robots, and uses the PVC to test its robots, said Vice President of Sales and Marketing Ken Wolf.
But PVC pipes, according to Pittsburgh police, can also be used by protesters who chain themselves together using the pipes, to thwart police efforts to make arrests. The apparatus is known as a "sleeping dragon," according to a statement released by Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard.
After the first such confiscation a few weeks ago, Wolf said, the firm spray painted its name on the pipes, but to no avail.
"We support whatever police believe is necessary to keep the public safe during the G-20," Wolf said, who added that the company was more amused by the incident than anything else. "But these pipes have nothing to do with the G-20 or protests."
Wolf said the company is pondering storing the 60-foot, multi-segmented pipes in another location besides the rear of its building on 43rd Street.
(Source: “RedZone Robotics: PVC piping for business, not G-20 protests”, Pittsburgh Business Times, September 17th, 2009)
Constitutional freedoms and reporting at NSSEs
In this kind of climate of paranoia, constitutional freedoms go out the window.As there had been at the 2004 RNC in New York City, there were also mass arrests in the Twin Cities during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
The first mass arrest of a total of three took place on Day 1, September 1st, at the intersection of Shepard and Ontario on the riverbank in St. Paul, netting a small amount of protesters, a literal handful of whom could be said to be antagonistic towards the police, and a larger amount of concert goers heading for the “Take Back Labor Day” concert on Harriet Island featuring Mos Def, Billy Bragg, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Atmosphere and a number of other international artists. Over 200 people were surrounded and arrested in a park.
The second mass arrest took place on Day 3, September 3rd, in the wake of a Rage Against The Machine concert in the Target Center in Minneapolis. After some entirely peaceful back and forth downtown, police herded concert goers, curious bystanders and journalists into a trap. 102 people were surrounded and arrested.
The third mass arrest took place on Day 4, the last night of the RNC, September 4th. Police instructed the remnants of an earlier demonstration to move south to the Marion Street Bridge, where over 300 people were surrounded and arrested, including interested bystanders and journalists.
At minimum, at least 600 of those arrested during the RNC—more than 75% of the total of over 800 people arrested, were arrested in a mass arrest situation.
Of these 800, somewhere in the region of 50 journalists were also arrested, including members of the commercial media—both local and national—prominent progressive journalists such as Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, and a host of other independent reporters.
The Marion Street Bridge mass arrest on Day 4 of the 2008 Republican National Convention was one of the events which the City-appointed Commission was unable to whitewash, due to the undeniably indiscriminate nature of the arrests and no shortage of footage.
While showing video footage of the Marion Street mass arrest during one part of the presentation of the report to the St. Paul City Council, Commission co-chair Heffelfinger emphasized, "While you're watching the footage, I want to remind you that this was taken by a WCCO reporter".
What is interesting about Heffelfinger's statement is the subtext that reveals his bias towards corporate news in a single sentence. While Andrew Luger made lip service to the Commission having watched the independent documentary Terrorizing Dissent, as reported in a January 10th St. Paul Pioneer Press article, the implication by Heffelfinger is that this Marion Street Bridge video was ‘real’ footage taken by a ‘real’ journalist—as if only corporate journalists' cameras do not lie and everyone else's video record is suspect.
What Heffelfinger failed to mention is that the WCCO camera man who shot the footage, Tom Aviles, was himself subsequently arrested on the Marion Street Bridge, despite carrying numerous press credentials and a large, professional-grade video camera. Aviles reported that he attempted to argue his case with police officers to no avail.
Aviles was arrested with a legally-permitted handgun in his backpack, declared to the police at the time of his arrest for “unlawful assembly”. This reporter was subsequently done a second disservice, to make the protesters look bad and the arrests look justified. St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington, in his report back to the St. Paul City Council, claimed that when the arrest took place on the bridge that one of the protesters was found with a gun.
City Pages journalist Matt Snyder reported overhearing a policeman on the Marion Street Bridge say to a colleague who was arguing his credentials were legitimate that "Well, I heard that press are going to jail tonight anyway, so it doesn't matter." (Source: “Dozens of journalists arrested at RNC: Their crime? Covering the story”, Matt Snyders, City Pages, September 10th, 2008)
Citizen media is not a crime
Prior to the 2008 RNC, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press warned of a worsening level of interference with the media at political conventions during the last 36 years:Before they are keepsakes, relegated to storage boxes and pinned to office walls, media credentials for political conventions are supposed to be something of a safeguard. They should guarantee some level of access to the event itself and — perhaps in conjunction with press passes assigned by the local police agency — help reporters cover the protests outside.
It’s doesn’t always work out so smoothly. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has set up free hotlines for journalists covering the political conventions since 1972, and every year reports of interference with the media — and worse — have mounted.
(Source: “Reporters beware at upcoming conventions”, Summer 2008 issue of The News Media & The Law, page 12, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press , August 1st, 2008)
The very tools utilized by independent media are becoming suspect. The month after the 2008 RNC, Agence France-Press reported that:
A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular micro-blogging service Twitter, Global Positioning System maps and voice-changing software as potential terrorist tools. [...]
A chapter on "Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter" notes that Twitter members sent out messages, known as "Tweets," reporting the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.
"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.
(Source: “Army Warns of Twitter Dangers”, Agence France-Presse, October 25th, 2008)
While this concern about ‘terrorist use’ of Twitter and GPS mapping may have the appearance of merit on the surface, the fact is that the army might as well be complaining about the ‘dangers’ of terrorists using telephone and paper maps, ubiquitous tools that are found in every home and can obviously be repurposed for any use under the sun.
The inference of these reports and their association of common technological tools with “terrorism”, is that the use of these mediums by activists, including independent media activists, legitimately invites both monitoring and the use of these feeds as evidence in court cases against protesters.
The right to practice citizen journalism and freely carry the tools of reporting is a fundamental right in any free society.
In the United States, whose First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees every citizen’s freedom of speech, it should be noted that video and still cameras, notepads and pens, and our very presence at protest events are all necessary components of data collection, which is a indivisible part of free speech.
Unless we are only allowed to freely speak about an event when we have no audio-visual documentation or direct experience of it, it is the job of every police officer on the street to guard freedom of speech by allowing citizens with cameras and microphones to observe, record, in order to be able to effectively express their opinions about these defining public events.
Nigel Parry is the coordinator of the RNC '08 Report, and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, Electronic Iraq, and Electronic Lebanon websites. He wrote one of the earliest war blogs between 1995-1998 from the Palestinian West Bank and is a member of the Committee to Protect Bloggers. He is attending the G20 in Pittsburgh, taking between September 24th-25th, and will be filing reports from the city. He can be contacted through the RNC '08 Report website.
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