Public Knowledge hopes to turn geeks into geektivists
Jei
jei at cc.hut.fi
Wed Jul 17 09:30:35 PDT 2002
http://news.com.com/2010-1074-943785.html?tag=politech
Bring in the geeks
By Declan McCullagh
July 15, 2002, 4:00 AM PT
WASHINGTON--Gigi Sohn hopes that geeks have become so enraged by
recent anti-piracy schemes that they'll finally want to fight back.
The 40-year old lawyer, head of the Public Knowledge nonprofit group
here, plans to recruit a ragtag band of technophiles and train them to
become a corps of effective political activists on the Internet front.
To Sohn, this means seizing on widespread discontent created by the
attempts of Hollywood and the music labels to curtail file-swapping
networks while promoting sweeping new anti-copying laws and standards.
E-mail campaigns are easily ignored, and transforming online ire into
effective political action is hardly a trivial task.
Geek armies have always been eager to vent in online forums and clog
the e-mail inboxes of errant congressional types. As far back as 1995,
over 50,000 peeved Netizens signed an electronic petition slamming the
Clinton administration's privacy-invasive Clipper Chip.
[...]
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