Independent Media Under Attack

From community radio stations to websites, independent media is under attack from government agencies and corporations.

Community Radio

Last year the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made headlines in a so-called "deregulation" effort designed to allow large corporations to further consolidate ownership of radio and television stations. In response, media activists held protests across the country. Locally, demonstrations took place outside of the Federal building downtown and at the regional office of the largest and most notorious radio conglomerates, ClearChannel. ClearChannel owns six radio stations in Pittsburgh and 1,250 in the U.S. Although the FCC's new ownership rules were blocked by a Federal District Court in Philadelphia, the existing FCC regulations nonetheless benefit large media conglomerates at the expense of small community broadcasters. Recent events suggest that the FCC is ready to vigorously enforce those regulations. Over the past year, the FCC has raided and shut down several community radio stations around the country as well as two in Allegheny County.

FRSC, Santa Cruz. In spite of the overwhelming support of the Santa Cruz Community and its lack of interference with other broadcasters, the FCC shut down Free Radio Santa Cruz (FRSC), a low-power, 42-watt FM station that had been operating for 10 years. (ClearChannel-owned WDVE-FM transmits at 100,000 watts.) On September 29, 2004, FCC Agents and U.S. Marshals with guns drawn raided the house from which FRSC broadcasts.  As agents removed over $5,000 of radio equipment, over 100 community members lined the street in front of the house in support of the station while being videotaped by Federal agents. After the FCC and Marshals removed the equipment, they returned to find that at least four of their vehicles no longer had air in their tires (which forced the agents and the seized equipment to be transported away by tow trucks). Within 48 hours of the raid, FRSC re-assembled a makeshift studio and resumed broadcasting over the internet. See freakradio.org.

KFAR, Knoxville. On September 15, 2004, Knoxville First Amendment Radio (KFAR) was also raided. For three years, the 100-watt station had carried alternative news, music and commentary. While KFAR had not been granted an official license, it complied with all other FCC regulations and did not interfere with any other radio station's signal. KFAR hoped to broadcast with a license, but licensing for low-power stations was blocked by efforts of the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio. According to the warrant left at the KFAR studio, the FCC, which enforces broadcasting laws on the basis of complaints, was acting on a complaint from an FBI agent on special assignment at Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). KFAR has been highly critical of the TVA over the course of the station’s three-year history, challenging TVA’s nuclear power program and its burning of coal mined in mountain top removal operations as well as nuclear weapons production in Oak Ridge. As a KFAR supporter notes, "KFAR was shut down on a complaint made by one federal agency to another federal agency...on the basis of its political content." KFAR is also maintaining an internet broadcast. See KFAR.org.

SFLR, San Francisco. In San Francisco last October, 2003, Federal agents, San Francisco police and FCC agents raided San Francisco Liberation Radio (SFLR) studios. SFLR was a micro-radio station that for ten years broadcast at 93.7 FM in the San Francisco bay area. It has garnered much public support for the work that it has done, including the August 19, 2003, passage of a resolution by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors supporting the station and directing the SF police leave the station alone. The 25-person police force arrived equipped with battering ram and firearms and confiscated all equipment in the station at the time. SFLR had been a vocal critic of the Bush administration policies regarding the war on terror in Iraq and elsewhere, as well as the California state and local policies including San Francisco's targeting of homeless people. It maintains a web broadcast at www.liberationradio.net.

The FCC has also been active shutting down small radio broadcasters here in the Pittsburgh Area.

South Side Radio. South Side Radio was started by Bob Bingham, a CMU Art professor, in 2001 as a Public Art Pittsburgh project in collaboration with the South Side Local Development Company (SSLDC).  With a tiny 1 Watt transmitter on top of the South Side's Carnegie Library, the station broadcasted interviews with local residents and could barely be heard as far away as Oakland at 102.9 FM. But now South Side Radio is silent altogether -- on Sept. 17, 2004, the FCC instructed Bingham to shut the station off. Bingham said, "Why the hell can't a small community broadcast their voices one mile in order to celebrate their neighborhood?"  He said he may start a new station in Homewood "with a new body of resident voices." The interviews broadcast on South Side Radio are still available online at: http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu:16080/~bingham/archive/ssr_arch.html

WCSA, Eastern Allegheny County. An unlicensed station run by two residents of Eastern Allegheny County called "WCSA Radio" was broadcasting at 220 Watts for only two hours per week on Saturday nights.  The station operators ran a two hour music show that had many listeners and that they received no reports of their station interfering with others. According to the operators, last September the FCC "came from Philly loaded for bear and all they found was my friend and I ... holding a microphone." The station has a website at wcsaradio.com which currently says, "Due to updates brought forth to us in the low power FM regulations, we are no longer broadcasting." They said their radio station "started out with two local kids with a great idea - Freedom of Speech."

RFB, Vermont. Radio Free Brattleboro (RFB) broadcasts at 10 watts of power at 107.9 FM to cover a radius of about two miles from its broadcast location, all within the confines of the town of Brattleboro. The open-access station began broadcasting in July 1998 as an independent, all-volunteer, non-commercial community radio station. RFB has been threatened with shutdown by the FCC since June of 2003, but in March of 2004, a local ballot initiative passed with nearly two-thirds of voters granting "authority to broadcast" to RFB. The FCC promptly filed an injunction to force RFB off the air but it was refused by a District Court.  RFB is still broadcasting today, after more than six years.

Despite the Federal government's assault on radio activists, communities throughout the U.S. like Brattleboro  continue to set-up low-power radio stations in defiance of repressive FCC regulations.

It's worth noting that the U.S. isn't the only country clamping down on community radio. Last August, Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency shut down a long running radio station in Porto Alegre. Radio stations in Oaxaca, Mexico and Port-au-Prince, Haiti have also suffered violent attacks in the past two months, and Radio for Peace International in Costa Rica was shut down after a five month siege.

Court Victories

Diebold, Inc. is the largest electronic voting machine maker in the country. Last September, 2003, copies and links to some 13,000 internal Diebold company memos were posted to Indybay Indymedia and other websites. The memos suggested that the company was aware of security flaws in its voting system when it sold the system to states. Diebold sent several cease-and-desist letters to Indybay's internet service provider (ISP), Online Policy Group (OPG), and threatened the Swarthmore College students who posted the stories with litigation. Diebold claimed the memos were stolen from a company server and that posting them or even linking to them violated copyright law.

Then on September 30, 2004, Diebold was found liable for violating a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when a U.S. District Court Judge ordered the company to pay damages and fees to OPG and to the students. Two weeks later the court decided on an amount of $125,000.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which took on the case for OPG, argued that the memos were an important part of the public debate on electronic voting systems. 

One day prior the Diebold decision, another U.S. District Judge ruled that a part of the U.S.A PATRIOT Act that allows the FBI to secretly demand information from ISPs was unconstitutional. Section 505 of the Act requires ISPs and any other type of communication providers -- including telephone companies -- to comply with secret "national security letters" from the FBI. Those letters can ask for information about subscribers -- including home addresses, telephone calls, e-mail subject lines and logs of visited web sites. The law was struck down on the grounds that it violates the First and Fourth Amendments. That court victory is particularly relevant to Indymedia, since only one month prior the Secret Service attempted to obtain the connection logs from NYC Indymedia's ISP, Calyx, during the Republican National Convention after someone posted a public list of delegates.

Despite those court victories, however, Indymedia would not be safe from the long arm of the State.

Server Seizure

On October 7, 2004, hard drives from two Indymedia servers were seized from the London office of a U.S.-owned web hosting company, Rackspace, perhaps at the request of the United States in collaboration with Italian and Swiss authorities.

To understand the significance of the governments' action, it may be helpful to first say something about the global Indymedia network. Pittsburgh's, for example, is one of about 140 Independent Media Centers (IMCs) located around the world, each of which are autonomous portions of the Indymedia Network. Each has their own website. Some of these share web servers, which are computers connected to the internet that deliver web sites and radio streams.

In the present case, the seizure of the hard drives from a computer in London shut down an Indymedia radio station and 22 different Indymedia websites from Antwerp to Brazil to Western Massachusetts. Thousands of individuals who posted one million articles on these web sites suddenly found their voices silenced by an unknown hand. If measured in terms of the number of countries and journalists affected by the seizure, it was an attack on independent media unlike the world has ever seen before.

One of the sites that was unplugged belonged to Uruguay Indymedia. Like many collectives in the Indymedia network, the Uruguayans didn't have the money to pay for web hosting and so they relied on the support of other countries. For Uruguay, it was an especially bad time for the attack to happen. Uruguay's national elections were to take place on October 31st and that website was a critical alternative news source.

Rackspace would not say who took the hardware, or why. They issued a brief statement that they turned over the servers in response to an order under a treaty designed to aid investigations of international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace also claimed that the court prohibited them from saying anything else.

An FBI spokesperson originally suggested to Agence France-Presse that the FBI issued a subpoena to Rackspace, but that it was "on behalf of a third country." Later he denied that the FBI had any involvement whatsoever. However, two weeks earlier the FBI had contacted Rackspace regarding photos of two Swiss undercover cops disguised as global justice protesters that were published on the Nantes Independent Media Center hosted on the Rackspace server. On Friday, October 1, the FBI followed up with a visit to Devin Theriot-Orr, the registered agent for the Seattle Independent Media Center. Orr, of course, had no authority regarding the Nantes IMC and that they should direct their request to the Nantes IMC. A few days after the seizure the Senior Federal Prosecutor for Geneva, Switzerland, confirmed that she had opened a criminal investigation into Indymedia -- but that she had not asked for the servers to be seized.

Later, Italy Indymedia learned that an investigation in Bologna could have precipitated the seizure. A Public Prosecutor for Bologna reportedly issued a request for information to U.S. authorities concerning posts published on Italy Indymedia, another one of the sites hosted on the U.K. server.  But the prosecutor said that she did not request the seizure of the server hardware, either.

On Wednesday, October 13th, Indymedia's seized hardware was mysteriously returned in the same way it disappeared -- without any information provided as to who took it or why, and on whose orders.  An employee at Rackspace emailed an Indymedia volunteer to say that they will "pass along any more information that becomes available and that I am allowed to." At the time of writing they have given Indymedia no further information. The EFF, who is representing the interests of Indymedia, has contacted the FBI, the Departments of State and Justice, the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Antonio and the U.S. Western District Court of Texas in an effort to determine the origin of the seizure order, but no agency has accepted responsibility. On October 25th, the EFF filed a motion to unseal the court order.

The editor for the International Press Institute summed up Indymedia's plight best: "The fact that the authorities' actions are shrouded in mystery leaves Indymedia in the Kafkaesque position of not knowing the identity of its accusers or the nature of their claim."

What happened to Indymedia sets a dangerous precedent. Using international cooperation frameworks to obscure due process erodes communication rights. Web-hosting providers may now be reluctant to offer their services to progressive media organizations for fear that the latter's sites might be taken down and all their other clients with them. Similarly, individuals may think twice before posting stories critical of their respective governments for fear of reprisal.

Indymedia volunteers are calling for supporters to sign a solidarity declaration at: solidarity.indymedia.org.uk denouncing the hard drive seizure and demanding a full disclosure of the names of organizations and individuals involved in the seizure, a copy of the court order, and an independent investigation into any violations of due process.  Numerous organizations have already expressed their solidarity with Indymedia, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Free Press, the International Federation of Journalists, among many others.

"I would say that this is an indication of the successfulness of the Indymedia network," says Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored. "Freedom of information is a radical idea when applied in a fair manner, and radical ideas will always be suppressed by the transnational corporate elites whenever possible."

For more information, visit www.indymedia.org.

- David Meieran, Matt Toups and members of Indymedia

Left, the photos of two Swiss undercover cops disguised as global justice protesters that were published on the Nantes Independent Media Center hosted on the Rackspace server. Right, community radio raid. (Photos from Indymedia)