New York City clamps down on SMS and mobile phone activism

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Mr. Hirsch said that the idea for TXTmob evolved from conversations about how police departments were adopting strategies to counter large-scale marches that converged at a single spot.

While preparing for the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston, some demonstrators decided to plan decentralized protests in which small, mobile groups held rallies and roamed the streets.

“The idea was to create a very dynamic, fluid environment,” Mr. Hirsch said. “We wanted to transform areas around the entire city into theaters of dissent.”

Tad Hirsch, who created a system that allowed users to form networks and transmit SMS messages to hundreds or thousands of mobile telephones called TXTmob, received a subpoena to hand over all remaining records of communications using the system in August 2004 to organise protests against the Republican Convention.

Kind of thing you’ll expect to hear about in Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.

In the Philippines, large scale demonstrations organized via cell phones and SMS were a major factor in forcing President Joseph Estrada to resign, thus bringing about change without large-scale violence. And this is the most known example amongst many others.

Question is whether these measures to interrogate new media / technologies with the aim of vitiating their subversive power can really, over the long term, make any real impact in a world where tech innovation is growing too fast for the parochialism of Governments to contain.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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2 thoughts on “New York City clamps down on SMS and mobile phone activism”

  1. Hi! For a full background on the story, see http://mobileactive.org/text-message-service-actvists-subpoenaed-new-york-city

    The protests took place in 2004, and txtmob, the grassroots service used for text messaging is now being subpoenaed to hand over user information as part of a law suit against New York city. It is not so much ‘clamping down’ as raising chilling (post-event) civil liberty and privacy questions that are of concern for mobile providers and activists alike.

    Katrin, MobielActive.org

  2. Pingback: When even democracies go awry with online dissent « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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