Imagine RNC protesters get creative with technology BY JESS KILBY

Imagine a bicyclist pedaling the streets of New York City during the Republican National Convention, spraying anti-Bush messages on sidewalks with water-soluble chalk paint. Imagine if the homemade dot-matrix printer that produced the messages was hooked up to an on-bike laptop, and you could go online and contribute your own suggested protest message.

Imagine, now, that NYC cops did not arrest the inventor of this wonderful contraption the day before the convention started, jail him without citing the charges, and confiscate his bicycle, laptop, and custom electronics. Imagine this did not happen after said police witnessed a media interview and demonstration of the bike, after the water-soluble nature of the paint had been clearly explained to them, and after the officer in charge agreed that the temporary graffiti did not constitute defacement.

Imagine if inventor/activist Joshua Kinberg had been free to go, and his Bikes Against Bush project (bikesagainstbush.com) — a masters thesis a year in the making — was carried to fruition.

Though Kinberg did indeed encounter the fate described above, and is awaiting his September 3 court date, he fortunately has not been the only protestor at the RNC making creative use of technology.

Take, for instance, the radical and somewhat abstruse Bureau of Inverse Technology, headed by University of California at San Diego art and engineering professor Natalie Jeremijenko. Recently featured on Wired.com, the BIT collective plans to deploy several of its initiatives during the convention:

Bit Balloon, a 10-foot balloon equipped with cameras, will snap aerial shots of the protesting crowds. BIT technologists can then use pattern-recognition software to generate attendance estimates for the media. (Though, as Wired reporter Noah Shachtman notes, those estimates may take a while to produce — the software isn’t quite ready to roll.)

Bit Radio, described by the collective as an "autopirate radio service," can override the signal on selected FM stations within a three-mile radius of the transmitter, for bursts of up to 10 seconds.

Volunteers working with Jeremijenko also plan to hand out 1400 face masks that will measure the level of pollutants in the Manhattan air. The project is similar to BIT’s ongoing Fade to Black endeavor, in which webcams in select locations (Houston, TX; Hollywood, CA; and the Bronx and Broadway in NYC) are aimed skyward. The point of the project is succinctly described on the BIT website (bureauit.org): "Image on the webcam fades to black as pollutant film accumulates on the lens."

Kinberg and Jeremijenko represent the bleeding edge of technology that activists have planned to use at the RNC, but by no means are they the full extent of tech-assisted protests. In fact, while Bikes Against Bush was derailed by authorities and the current status of the BIT projects remains unknown, actions using more "off the shelf" technology appear to be meeting with greater success.

Point in case: The biggest star of the week is shaping up to be the humble text message — tweaked, of course, to facilitate instantaneous communication between hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters. Two separate web sites (ruckus.org, txtmob.com) are currently allowing users to subscribe to real-time updates on the movement of police, protesters, and delegates, and to create their own "loops" to which others can subscribe. As of the first official day of the convention, text messaging has been used to organize First Amendment read-ins and a kiss-in, and to help both pedestrian and cyclist protesters steer clear of the cops.

There’s also an ambitious week-long project being organized by blogger John Barlow (barlow.typepad.com) that, if successful, will see cadres of plainclothes protesters breaking into spontaneous dance on Manhattan’s sidewalks with absolutely no warning to the delegates Barlow hopes to befuddle. Using a Ruckus text-message loop, dancers disguised as business people, tourists, and everyday New Yorkers will inconspicuously report to areas where conventioneers are thick but protesters are banned, crank the tunes, get down, then disappear back into the crowd.

"I don’t want to confront the Republicans," Barlow writes on his site, "I want to discombobulate them.

"I promise you," he adds, "this will make the Republicans uncomfortable. They will return to their partisan duties with a sense of disquiet that will slightly but surely fuzz the intensity of their focus. Besides, we’ll enjoy it. That alone will irritate them. And we’ll be doing nothing they can arrest us for."

Avoiding arrest — or, at the very least, engaging in non-violent actions — has been a central theme to all of the varied RNC protests. There seems to be a general understanding that riots and mayhem are exactly what the GOP hopes to see from protesters, and activists appear admirably determined to deny the Republicans this ideological victory.

Even the anarchist contingency, represented by groups like the Black Hat Hacker’s Bloc, is concentrating on actions that — while potentially (and in some instances, verifiably) illegal — are intended to harm neither humans nor physical property. The BHHB online manifesto encourages those with the skills and the motivation to "deface [GOP] Web sites, flood email servers, cause financial disruption, change electronic billboards. Turn the system over and put the people on top."

Interestingly, both activists and technologists have largely repudiated the BHHB and those like them. Some question whether the group is actually an FBI plant, others point out that some of BHHB’s proposed actions are in fact felonies.

But in an email to Wired’s Shachtman, hacker activist The Pull perhaps best articulates the reason for such widespread opposition to BHHB’s tactics: "If you feel that you must shut up someone through intimidation or false accusations or any other method — you are not relying on the superiority of the truth," he writes. "People can not condemn censorship and then embrace it."

Jess Kilby can be reached at jesskilby@yahoo.com