Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Being The Press - A Counter Protest Hack

For the life of me, I thought around the time of the Miracle on the Hudson I had written a blog post about how handy it might be to have a publishing platform setup for reporting about live events. Given a cell phone and a blogging platform, you could quickly publish video, photos and text of any event you happened to stumble upon. I even setup and have used a special twitter account for exactly this: liveonlocation. To this day, I have this account setup and ready to go should I stumble on something newsworthy.

Only, I can't seem to find any mention of the above blog post.

Yesterday, ITS Tactical took the instance news-reporter idea further, and with this suggestion:

In January, I moved from a sleepy midwest town with population of less than 2,500 to a seething metropolis of several million in a nation with an unstable interim government and a Prime Minister that leads a political party that is still on the US terror watch list.

Protests are a way of life here. There was recently a period of seven straight days on which I encountered large groups of protesters blocking roads, chanting, waving flags, and burning torches.
...
Protesting is About Attention! Use that to your advantage. Protesters love the press. It can be a relatively simple proposition to get a press pass that will get you through/past protests that completely block traffic. Afterwards, ask them for a letter stating you have written for them, etc.

Not a bad idea. For $1.99 I registered liveonlocation.info, and for a few bucks more I should be able to create a press-pass looking plastic card.

Whether it's just for fun, or as a counter-protesting maneuver, this seems like a winning hack. I'd also think this would be fun for kids too, as who wouldn't want to have an adult looking badge?

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