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. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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