Textual Healing

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet. Posted September 11, 2004.

The guerrilla musicians from the Infernal Noise Brigade were tuning their instruments, preparing to lead an unannounced, un-permitted march from Union Square to Madison Square Garden. Independent journalists from the Indymedia Center were putting fresh cassettes in their video cameras. An activist was instructing people to line up two-by-two in a straight line because "that way the police don't have a legal right to stop us when we march." The cops were mulling about waiting for whatever would come.

Then, Union Square started beeping with a symphony of cell phone text message alerts. It was like the activist version of that scene in the awful Tom Clancy movie "The Sum of All Fears" when the mobile phones of all of the CIA and White House honchos start ringing during a presidential dinner party. "From comms-dispatch," read the message. "Reports of police using orange mesh fencing to surround protesters at Herald Square. Riot cops moving in. Cameras, medics and legal observers needed."

Throughout the week in New York, independent journalists and activist groups used text-messaging technology to coordinate an impressive, groundbreaking campaign of direct action and comprehensive news reporting. It was one of the many creative, guerilla tactics employed by the decentralized resistance movement in North America that grew out of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. In contrast to the multi-million dollar security budgets for the Democratic and Republican conventions and at the recent FTAA meetings in Miami, activists are using existing technology that is virtually cost free to mobilize hundreds of actions and thousands of activists.

In addition to the various groups using SMS text messaging to send out action alerts, warnings, news and announcements, the New York Independent Media Center (IMC) set up an automated information line that activists could call 24 hours a day to hear breaking news from Indymedia, a calendar of events and to listen to a live streaming broadcast from the A-noise radio collective, which was broadcasting live reports from the streets. At protests past, the work of Indymedia was primarily available to people at home. In New York, it went mobile. And it was a huge success.

"Our task is to help facilitate horizontal communication and information distribution to all the activists in the streets," says Evan Henshaw-Plath, the Indymedia tech activist who developed the info-line concept. "The police want to keep the protests under control and stay a step ahead of the protesters. So, all of this communications infrastructure helps on a tactical level. We've appropriated technology as an essential tool for radical social change."

He points to a moment during Sunday's mass protest when the "Thousand Coffin March" needed 60 more people and, through text messaging and the information line, they were able to rapidly deploy the needed people. "When there is a blockade or arrests, activists know where to go or how to avoid arrest," he said. "All of this helps make the protest more effective."

"It was a last minute project, which showed how using free software and about $10, we could create quality phone based information systems," said Henshaw-Plath.

The project grew out of a concept developed by Aspiration Tech of San Francisco a few weeks before the RNC. It was based on a software package called Asterisk, which takes information from the web and converts it to speech to provide it to mobile phones. "We were looking into applications for non-profits and activist organizations to use VOIP and internet telephony in relation to their work and the upcoming presidential elections," says Henshaw-Plath. "After getting the system setup, a casual conversation lead to the topic of 'wouldn't it be cool to do something like this for the RNC protests next week?'"

Henshaw-Plath says that despite almost no publicity, the service received more than 2000 calls over a 4-day period.

The SMS text messaging was coordinated primarily by using a free service from a website called txtmob.com. Users could create a personal account free of charge and sign up for groups similar to e-mail list serves. Some of them were unmoderated and had unreliable information. But others, like the ones operated by nyc.indymedia.org and the NY Comms collective, were moderated, accurate and effective.

"There is this ongoing problem of lack of media coverage of protest activity, particularly in the United States," says the founder of TXTMob.com who goes by the nom de guerre of John Henry. "Text messaging becomes another tool in the activist arsenal, a way of representing their actions to the outside world in a direct manner, rather than being dependent upon establishment mass media to tell their story for them."

Jeremy Scahill is a producer/reporter for the national radio and TV show Democracy Now!

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »