mobius1ski

If you haven’t been down to Zuccotti Park, rather than rehashing it myself, I recommend reading Richard Kim’s love letter in The Nation to the human microphone – the means of sound amplification currently employed by the unpermitted occupiers of Wall Street.

The need for human amplification became apparent early on with the protests as the NYPD started seizing megaphone wielding demonstrators off the street, as depicted in this widely circulated video:

While the human microphone has its merits and is remarkable for many positive reasons (as Jeff Sharlet tweeted, for example: “Interesting thing about human mike @ #occupywallstreet is that u repeat things you may not agree with. Which can change thinking.”), the truth is, it’s fairly impractical and at times simply infuriating to listen to – at least from my perspective – as it breaks up the natural flow of speech, and thus the natural process of listening.

Pondering this conundrum, it occurred to me that there is, perhaps, a way around the sound permit issue that would allow everyone to hear a speaker clearly without the need for unpermitted amplification equipment, or for the big game of telephone.

In an interview with The Forward newspaper the other day, my friend Ronen – who helped to organize this summer’s economic protests in Israel – asked “Why not buy a few hundred megaphones and dare them to arrest everyone?” It’s a clever thought, though megaphones could be prohibitively expensive, and if the Brooklyn Bridge arrests are any indication, the cops are not afraid to lock up several hundred people at once.

But what if you told everyone to bring a Walkman? Or a battery-powered AM/FM radio they could listen to quietly? The Coby CX73 retails at just $4.

Low-power radio broadcasting equipment is relatively inexpensive and readily available. Truth be told, you could even hack an iTrip and extend its broadcast range upwards of 100 feet. Under the FCC’s Part 15 regulations, an individual can operate a radio station without a license so long as they do not interfere with licensed operators’ broadcasts and their broadcast range is limited to ~200 feet. Setting up a local radio station in Zuccotti Park is thus both affordable and legal.

Luckily, according to John Anderson of DIYMedia.net, the folks at Global Revolution (who are also responsible for the Occupy Wall Street Livestream) already thought of that and setup a microradio station at 107.1FM that is currently broadcasting within the park! But is anyone listening? And is there a concurrent Internet audio stream?

What if that station were to broadcast speakers during the General Assembly, the People’s Soapbox and other speaking events? And what if, instead of handing them a microphone, enabling the police to easily identify and target the source of the broadcast by tracing back the microphone cable, the station operator setup a Skype dial-in number that would rebroadcast over the airwaves? A speaker would simply need to pick up their phone, dial a number, and instantly be speaking directly into the Walkmen, boomboxes, and smartphone radio streaming apps of their fellow demonstrators.

As long as your radio isn’t blaring and “disturbing the peace,” the police would have absolutely no recourse and no justification to arrest anyone. They can’t arrest one person for talking on their cellphone and hundreds, if not thousands of others, for listening to their headphones.

It may be the simplest way of evading the need for a permit and pissing off neighborhood residents, and would allow for the General Assembly and other speaking events to carry far into the night.