THE AIRWAVES ARE an extremely valuable commodity. More correctly, control of the airwaves is an extremely valuable commodity. For the most part, control of the airwaves was staked out in a land rush that predates the current feeding frenzy over cyberspace by nearly a century. It also made the 'settling' of America's West look like a truly democratic event. After all, anybody who had horses, a wagon, and some basic survival skills – and who didn't mind building a home on the graves of the Native Americans and watering its lawn with their tears – could own a piece of the American Dream. It might not have been a very big piece. In most cases it was not. But it was there for the taking. Not so the airwaves. The airwaves have gone to the government, a few corporations, and the relative handful of rich people who control them. It is near instantly obvious to anyone who has ever twisted a dial that it not the folks next door who are doing the broadcasting.
Then came the micro-radio movement. Hundreds of Americans have soldered together low-power FM transmitters and set up broadcasting studios in their apartments and low-rent storefronts. Some reached only a block or two. Some could be heard for a couple of miles. Ordinary people had a piece of the airwaves by them, for them, and about their tastes and interests. Tastes and interests corporate radio saw fit to ignore. Then came wave after wave of repression. This is no news to those of you who have been following A. Clay Thompson's excellent series in the Bay Guardian. Those of you who rely on mainstream media for your news about such things have remained fairly clueless until very recently. On Jan. 20, 2000, the Federal Communications Commission made a ruling on micro radio that mainstream news media reported as a great victory for micro radio and for democracy. What had been 'pirate' radio, we were told, had been 'legalized.' Hurrah. On the surface of it, it does look good. Under the new rules, 1,000 micro stations will be licensed. Two licenses will likely be set aside for San Francisco. Alameda County should get two or three. I should be happy. A lot of folks are.
"It's pretty amazing, actually," pioneering micro broadcaster Stephen Dunifer told the Guardian, "It's definitely a step forward and a victory for the movement."
Corporate radio and television stations see it differently. Surprisingly, they are not alone. Some micro-radio activists see it differently, too. One put it like this:
The (Low Power FM) Dream Died Jan 20, 2000
The FCC voted Jan 20th for a version of LPFM, stripped of all the essential ingredients as proposed in my petition RM-9242, dated Feb 19, 1998, and in the FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. The proposal was so watered down as to effectively kill LPFM as we all had envisioned it.
By keeping the 2nd adjacent channel restriction, hopes for a LPFM channel in major markets, where LPFM was needed most, are gone. There will be few, if any, large population areas where a LPFM channel can be found with the 2nd adjacent channel restriction in force.
Power was reduced from 1000 watts, as proposed, to 100 watts maximum thus shrinking the coverage from 9 miles down to 3.5 miles.
The final nail in the coffin of LPFM stripped the service of being able to support itself by making it "non-commercial only" with the sale of commercials to support the station prohibited. This decision will make it impossible for most stations to support themselves without being able to rely on commercial support, a system of support that the majority of stations today rely on. In addition, many local businesses that cannot afford advertising on full-power stations would have benefited from being able to advertise on a LPFM station. Now these small businesses will not be able to advertise on LPFM stations since they are being made non-commercial only.
It is a sad day for many Americans who had hoped LPFM could right many of the wrongs in the radio industry brought on by consolidation. Here is proof that the special interests, such as the major broadcast chains and their mouthpiece, the (National Associations of Broadcasters), control America and the FCC!
Thanks to all the wonderful folks nationwide who worked so long and hard to try to make America better by creating a workable LPFM service. Although a few small churches may benefit from the service as created, the vast majority of potential LPFM station owners, including many minorities, have been stripped of all hope of ever owning their own radio station. FCC Chairman Kennard is to be praised for his relentless efforts to create a workable LPFM service but in the end he was unable to get the votes of two other Commissioners needed, due to extreme pressure applied by the NAB. So instead of a workable LPFM service that we all had hoped for, we get instead a LPFM service so watered down from its original proposal as to be almost useless. It is a shameful day in American broadcast history.
We tried our best and fought the good fight.
Micro-radio advocates span the entire breadth of the political spectrum: left, right, center and 'other.' They disagree about almost everything and say so, aloud and repeatedly. They do tend to agree about micro radio itself, though. The government, they say, should get off its back. That they differ as to whether it has done so or not is a surefire clue that more is going on here than meets the eye. So I began to wonder if perhaps the government contradicts itself on the issue, too. Well, guess what? The government's long-standing tradition of saying one thing and doing another is still alive and well. Thriving in fact. The Native Americans were right all along. The 'Great White Father' does indeed 'speak with forked tongue.'
One branch of the government, the FCC, feinted with a very public, but not very substantial, sop to the micro-radio movement. Meanwhile, out of the public's eye, another branch, U.S. Customs, has been raiding certain of the companies who supply parts and kits to all electronic hobbyists, not just to 'pirate' broadcasters. Significantly, it is not the large, well-known companies like the ubiquitous Radio Shack that have been getting raided. It has been little guys who have had thier premises violated and their perfectly legal property confiscated under conditions of extremely dubious legality. It has been little guys who have been threatened with the wrath of the state if they objected. It has been places like Ramsey Electronics of Victor, New York, a small town near Buffalo. Ramsey Electronics sells educational electronic kits to hobbyists, school children, and amateur radio experimenters. They were recently stormed by seven armed U.S. customs agents accompanied by three New York state troopers. While these were certainly not the jackbooted G-men of Waco fame, they were definitely scary. These days any armed Fed at the door can chill the stiffest spine. These guys are dangerous. They can pillage and murder with impunity. You do not want to hear their knock on your door.
It is interesting that they felt they needed a small army to raid John Ramsey's business. It is not a fortified compound. It resides quite openly and freely accessible in an office park where anyone and everyone can and does wander in and out throughout the day. "It's not," says John, "like we're in a dingy basement in the inner city surrounded by hit-men and drug labs."
The search warrant they carried accused Ramsey Electronics of selling devices that might be in violation of U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2512. That means that the stuff they've been selling to thousands of Boy Scouts, scientists, and amateur radio hobbyists all these years was determined by the feds to be "primarily designed for surreptitious use," presumably by international espionage organizations, terrorist groups, and criminals.
As the hacker quarterly 2600 succinctly put it:
The U.S. Dept. of Justice is apparently reinterpreting federal wiretapping and smuggling laws to include small hobby radio transmitters. Even possessing so-called "Mr. Microphone" type toys can now put hobbyists at risk of looking down the barrel of a federal agent's loaded gun, a felony conviction, federal prison time, loss of property, and legal fees into the tens of thousands of dollars.
According to John Ramsey, two of the agents were recognized by a technician as having visited the showroom the previous week pretending to be customers. They had asked this technician if some of the devices could be used to bug offices. They had then tried to persuade him to assure them that some of the products could specifically be used for bugging offices and asked if he could tell them how to "increase the power to go farther." The technician correctly told them that all of the products were for hobbyists. "If you want something like that," he told them, "You're in the wrong place."
For 42 years CyberSKIP magazine has been for amateur hobbyists like John Ramsey's customers, and not an "authority in the fine points of law." Nevertheless, even CyberSKIP says this "smacks of entrapment." As someone with a more than passing acquaintance with the concept, I must agree wholeheartedly. Yes, this is entrapment, classical entrapment, a textbook case. It worked too, even though no one at Ramsey Electronics, least of all the technician, violated any laws whatsoever in the undercover agents' presence. The agents drove the 75 miles back to Buffalo and got a warrant anyway.
Thankfully, it was served sans machine guns and flashbangs. That doesn't mean it wasn't intimidating. The agents ordered Ramsey to his office and ordered him to "stay there and don't move." He was ordered to sit down -- then they told him that if he didn't cooperate, "we'll shut down your business, send everyone home, and we'll bring in computer experts to dissect your computers bit by bit, and we don't care if it takes months." John Ramsey sat down. "If you don't cooperate, the agents said, we can tie you up forever."
Then the agents revealed what they came for. The list was long, but what they were particularly after were wireless microphones and wireless microphone kits. Wireless microphones are, by definition, micro-radio transmitters. So it is entirely possible that the intimidating raids on Ramsey and other suppliers were intended, at least in part, to strike at the logistical requirements of some members of the micro-radio movement even as, with the other hand, the FCC rewards others with official approval. Is the government playing "good cop/bad cop" here? Maybe. It would explain a lot.
This is not to say that the government was not also doing exactly what they are apparently attempting to appear to be doing. To anyone unfamiliar with the politics of low-power FM broadcasting this selective federal crackdown appears to be aimed at enforcing a state/corporate monopoly on the use of cutting-edge surveillance technology. After all, neither Radio Shack nor Dunifer himself was raided. So maybe it is all about suppressing unauthorized spying by electronic means after all.
If you doubt the enormously critical role a shortage of parts can play in the outcome of certain historical processes, I suggest you read up on the strategic bombing of the ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt during the Second World War. I find it interesting, though, that while the government has chosen to selectively concentrate on parts that could conceivably be of interest to unauthorized broadcasters, private investigators, and journalists, it has failed to raid Grand Auto and Kragen for selling what it takes to turn your backyard satellite dish into a terrorist-grade TED disrupter. You definitely do not want one aimed at your computer, let alone at a plane in which you are flying. I guess the government must consider pinhole cameras and low-power, neighborhood FM a more serious threat.
Some people see government monopolization of surveillance technology as analogous to gun control and as such a good thing, just as if either were possible. After all, who wants to have to worry that their neighbors are spying on them electronically? Well, you do have to worry about the neighbors spying on you electronically, and that's just the way it is, so get used to it. The genie is out of the bottle. It can never be put back in. Anybody who really wants to overhear what you say and watch what you do when you think you are alone can do it. The requisite knowledge is available. The necessary parts are available. Even kits are available. Even if no kits were available, availability of parts will never be a problem, and the knowledge of how to assemble them is too widely disseminated to ever be forgotten. Forget it. It ain't gonna happen. Besides, the soldering involved is child's play. Rocket science it ain't. The cost of parts is relatively incidental. The technology of electronic surveillance can no more be suppressed than can the technology of firearms. You're going to have to worry about getting spied on and shot and a whole lot of other things even less pleasant and no law and no government is even going to be able to change that. I don't like it either, but it is what it is and must be factored in. So don't mope and whine about it. Factor it in and move on.
Do you want to live in a place where the only guys with guns are the government? I sure as hell don't. An unarmed people are slaves, or subject to slavery at any time. Neither do I want to live in a place where the government and the corporations have what it takes to spy on us but we the people lack what it takes to return the compliment. The main thing it takes is the know-how. Knowledge is the ultimate weapon. Surveillance technology is weapons technology. Communications technology is weapons technology. Given government's 5,000-year history of oppression by any and all means, we the people can ill afford to be unarmed. Our knowledge must be inclusive and it must be up-to-date.
Which brings me to my final point. I can't take my leave without asking a little favor of y'all. While I was researching this column I focused as well as I could. But I couldn't help being distracted a little by the events at Pine Ridge, S.D. One event in particular has proved very intriguing, more so even than the enormous degree to which the 'fog of war' has made it nearly impossible to keep up with what's actually happening on the ground there since the current protest began.
It's this damn radar anomaly. Radar anomalies are actually more common than you'd think. I wouldn't care so much about this particular one if it didn't 'coincide' with a significant social and political event that has also been pretty much blacked out of the mainstream media. I'm leery of such coincidences, especially when they happen in places with such deep and long-standing, covert federal involvement as Pine Ridge. I've been trying to chase down the source of this anomaly since it was first spotted. I've heard a variety of possible explanations, mostly from the denizens of an electronic-warfare listserv to which I subscribe. Some are quite plausible. Some electronic-mind-control buffs I know also made disturbingly plausible conjectures. But I'm not entirely convinced I've heard the definitive one yet.
If this is some kind of weapon in test or action, I want to know about it. If it is some sort of mass mind-control device in test or action, I want to know about it. Whatever it is, I want to know about it. I would vastly prefer that it turns out to be something harmless and natural. But whatever it is, I'll factor the knowledge in and move on. If you would like venture a (preferably educated) guess you can e-mail me at nessie@sfbg.com or go to our new conferencing system, altcity.com, where a message board is devoted to this column and its readers. Altcity is still in beta, so excuse our dust. But it's also fun, so drop on by.
_____________________________
The nessie files runs alternate Mondays. To discuss this column in altcity, our virtual community, click here.
