SF pirate radio

I was overjoyed to find an article about Pirate Cat Radio in the SF Weekly! It’s a fine lpfm station and SF is lucky to have such fare available over the airwaves. Thanks for spreading the word and giving us an idea of the history of the station.

In the article, there’s a quote attributed to Monkey Man that merits correction: “As much as San Fancisco Liberation Radio liked to say they were shut down for saying dangerous things (last year), they were actually interfering with the Oakland airport.” I have been a principal organizer of SFLR since May ’02 and I was at the station when the FCC, Federal Marshals, and SFPD goons arrived to seize the equipment. My signature is on the papers from the raid and on the warning that SFLR received 2 months prior to the raid. On both the warning and the arrest warrant, there’s a box marked: interference and on neither paper is that box checked. Furthermore, by day, I’m an aerial photographer. I fly over the Bay Area about once a week and have frequently landed at the Oakland Airport. Just once in all these trips have I heard any radio station interference, and, while I’m not naming names here, it was a classical station!

San Francisco Liberation Radio is presently an internet station and is also mounting a legal challenge to the method the FCC uses most frequently to shut down illegal broadcasters: the raid. The raid is convenient because permission to do it doesn’t require any due process or trips before the judge by both parties to give both sides the chance to make their case. A group of lawyers, mostly from the National Lawyers’ Guild, is mounting our challenge. The date for this showdown is Feb. 11 at the Federal Bldg. 450 Golden Gate, in the19th floor courtroom of the Hon. Susan Ilston. If we succeed, raiding will become a thing of the past. Possibly good news for Pirate Cat Radio!

Why was SFLR shut down? I don’t know, but I have some ideas. The station had been on the air for over 11 years, first in the Richmond district and then the Castro. During our legal challenge, I have been contributing some low level legal help to our lawyers. One of my tasks was to collate the 800 pages of exhibits the US Attorney’s office has assembled about San Francisco Liberation Radio since 1992. I became aware that FCC officers had been to the station locations a lot without giving any indication of their presence. They had taken numerous field readings to test the strength of the signal (and stated they’d found no interference with any other radio frequency), had listened to the station and written down every word of some parts of the shows, had taken pictures of the two locations from different vantage points, had a record of the license plates of cars frequently parked on the street outside the station! Reading the exhibits was like reading a history of the station from the government’s point-of-view. Of course, nobody was arrested in the raid. The warrant reads: The people of the USA (!!?) vs. the radio equipment of San Francisco Liberation Radio.

On March 19-20, 2003, there was a massive protest against the Iraq War that shut down the downtown area of SF. It was beautifully organized and was more effective than anything this area has seen before. SFLR was proud to have played a small part in the protest in that people out on the streets would use their cell phones to call the Independent Media Center’s internet radio station: Enemy Combatant Radio 24 hours a day with updates on the movements of the protestors and the police, arrests, scenes from the streets. SFLR received these live feeds and broadcast them over the airwaves. So people could listen to their Walkmen and know what was happening. Within a few months of this protest, the Independent Media Center had gone through an internal upheaval and split into 2 Indymedias: the San Francisco Indymedia and the SF Bay Indymedia. They are now both very fine websites for alternative news, but for a time the focus was on internal issues. And SFLR had been shut down. So, had there been another protest, the link between the groups of people in the streets was disrupted. Now, with Monkey Man and his alternative NPR, activists again have their channel of communication open. Yeah! Let’s use them!
How about on Jan. 21st at the Roe v. Wade march?? Whaddya say ECR and Pirate Cat??