Intellectual Property Law

Protesters marched at the the intersection of Market and Montgomery Streets in downtown San Francisco Wednesday afternoon.
Jonathan Snyder, Wired.com

San Francisco anti-war protesters marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq are using the micro-blogging service Twitter to coordinate their movements throughout the day.

DASW is using Twitter to text message and manage crowds of geographically-dispersed anti-war protesters.
Courtesy Twitter.

The group, called Direct Action to Stop the War, has planned protests and staged events at strategic locations around the city, such as AT&T's facilities on Folsom, where whistle blower and retired AT&T technician Mark Klein says the company has installed equipment to snoop on Americans' internet communications. They're using Twitter to text people's cellphones to get them to come to support the protest and to lend it critical mass at opportune times.

David Taylor, a DASW volunteer and veteran political protest organizer, says that Twitter has been a useful and cost-effective way to keep participants updated at strategic moments on their cellphones.

"What's new in the last four years is the addition of the text messaging," says Taylor. "In the past, (street protest organizers) have had walkie-talkies out there and a bullhorn, but the people with the radios would always get arrested by the police."

Would-be protesters can subscribe for live updates on developments and news of the group's activities on their cell phones. Twitter updates are sent to the cellphones as text messages. The service is free for DASW since Twitter's footing the bill for sending the text messages, notes Taylor.   

A protester in downtown San Francisco on Wednesday.
Jonathan Snyder, Wired.com

The group previewed a small subset of its planned disruptions of the work-day by publicizing a list of ideas in a widely-circulated e-mail, but many specifics of the local group's activities have deliberately been kept secret until a strategically opportune time, say its organizers.

"The action needs to happen with an element of surprise," says Taylor, whose day job is directing Radical Designs, a San Francisco web development group for nonprofits. "If the idea is to surround corporate headquarters and blockade it, you don't want hundreds of people milling around it before it starts."

DASW organizers are already reporting that five people have been arrested apparently in an incident related to the University of California at San Francisco, and that there's a request for support because of "heavy police presence" at 345 California Street, for example. The service is currently urging participants to tune into its pirate radio station set up for the day at 102.5 FM where protest participants are calling in with their updates. Updates are also available for those with web access at Indybay, a volunteer-driven independent media reporting site.

Thanks to text messaging organizers can now communicate and centrally manage large crowds of people spread over wide geographic areas with text messages, Taylor says.

DASW also plans on using Twitter for rumor control and for public safety. For example, if they know that the police are on the way to do a random sweep of an area, they might send out a Twitter message telling the protesters the quickest way of getting out of a particular spot.

Though he's mum on the specifics of Wednesday's activities, some of them are against San Francisco' s local members of Congress.

Taylor promises that there'll be a lot going on.

"We're going to see a lot of action against (senator Diane) Feinstein and (Rep. Nancy) Pelosi -- they haven't been responsive to people's desire to end this war," he says. "I think people expected a lot more from a Democratic congress than they've seen so far, and that's what they ran on in 2006. They've been relatively spineless and caved to the Bush administration."

Photos from downtown San Francisco protest: Jonathan Snyder, Wired.com