On last Wednesday the 14th, Kimo Crossman and I had lunch at Original Joe's in the Tenderloin, not far from where he lives on Market Street.
We walked the five blocks from the restaurant to City Hall, where there was a media frenzy in progress.
There had been a press conference about the infamous Bayview Station "cop videos" involving lots of questionable humor.
The Bayview/Hunter's Point neighborhood wasn't amused, the mayor and police chief Heather Fong got hysterical, and lots of absurd drama ensued involving the suspension and quick reinstatement of 24 policemen and lots of posturing by all kinds of spokesmodels.
The local media, as usual, didn't bother asking the obvious question. How can you have "community policing," the latest buzz phrase, when the overwhelming majority of new hires over the last five years have been from outside the city and county of San Francisco, worsening a nepotistic, lazy and out-of-touch police force.
It really might help to recruit some new officer from Hunter's Point/Bayview itself. Last I heard, it's not as if the neighborhood is suffering from too many jobs.
And the argument that San Francisco is too expensive for police and their families is nonsense. They all make more than most of my friends living in the city and have benefits galore.
Oh well, the old media is crumbling in front of our eyes, as evidenced by developments like Eddie Codell's "Geek Entertainment TV." Eddie was one of the organizers of WebZine 2005, which I wrote about earlier in the year here.
One of his first Quicktime movies is an interview with Kimo by Irina Slutsky that's very funny and conveys a lot of Kimo's charm. Click here to see it.
Kimo first got in touch with me at WebZine and then started hounding me with emails and phone calls when he started looking into the WiFi situation in San Fracisco. As a number of city officials have discovered, he doesn't take "no" for an answer very well.
At first I thought he was a complete flake but I turned out to be wrong.
Though he's amazingly naive about politics, particularly the institutional corruption at San Francisco's City Hall that probably dates from Barbary Coast days, Kimo is not stupid.
Supervisor Mirkarimi's aide, Steven, had the best line of the day which he uttered after being handed a four-page packet to brief the supervisor. "A really intelligent person like yourself going after bureaucrats? Gosh, the poor people. I actually feel sorry for them."
Because Kimo has thrown such a wrench into the works of whatever plan Mayor Newsom, his overseers and his minions were working out behind closed doors, there have been many rumors that Kimo was being paid by rival commercial entities.
Recently, he sent me the following note explaining who he was and what he was doing:
I am not a politico, just a techie. I've never done this before. I just want a good solution for San Francisco. And I'm not against antennas or against Google, and I am representing absolutely no other organization. I am not a conspiracy freak, just upset that the creation of a new de facto Franchise that sells the public's privacy for a free WiFi system is probably something that should have maximum public input.
WiFi has the ability to replace the following services: Cell Phone, DSL, Cable HSI, Cable TV, Land Phone Line, Alarm System Radio. So it's kind of a big dealio...
It's also a chance to roll out a diaster-proof communication system that the Public can use for Public Safety, unlike what happened in Katrina and 9/11. So far the City has been unwilling to seriously consider this option.
As I can attest, he's extremely determined, and once he discovered the local Sunshine Act legislation, his programmer's detail-oriented brain went into overdrive and he's been trying to get to the bottom of the mucky barrel with a host of document requests, which are making a number of people in City Hall insane.
On the Department of Telecommunications and Information website, in the TechConnect section (which is amazingly skimpy with its updated information), there is a recent "ALERT" in a box which takes one to a one-paragraph PDF that says the following:
Notice Regarding Unauthorized Posting of an RFP Draft
The City is aware that a copy of a draft document labeled “Confidential Draft – For Internal Review Only”, titled “City and County of San Francisco Request for Proposals for Wireless Tech Connect – Community Wireless Broadband Network”, and dated December 8, 2005, has been posted on a website that is not hosted or controlled by the City. This confidential draft is a document protected by the attorney-client privilege. The City did not authorize the person who obtained this document to view or possess it. The City does not consent to its disclosure on a website or in any other manner, and does not waive the attorney-client privilege for this document. All persons should disregard this document for purposes of reviewing or responding to any Request for Proposals that the City may issue in connection with a community wireless broadband network.
Somebody anonymously sent the document to Kimo and all of a sudden we have our very own "Pentagon Papers." There are also rumours that the City of San Francisco is going to sue Kimo for making them liable to lawsuits, which makes as much sense as the "attorney-client" privilege in the statement above.
On Friday the 16th, another oddly named Board of Supervisors group, the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFco) had another hearing into the secrecy of the WiFi process, and the three supervisors, particularly Mirkarimi, grilled the DTIS director Chris Vein fairly harshly.
Most of the same people who testified at Monday's Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing came up to the microphone and repeated their testimony for Supervisors McGoldrick, Ammiano and Mirkarimi.
The vast majority of the speakers were extraordinarily articulate and were able to translate intelligently and calmly why the current process needed to be rethought.
For more info on this issue, there are a few good articles on the web. Jackson West from SFist wrote a really prescient guest column about all the players in this drama some months ago (click here). Renee Zelles at BeyondChron wrote a good wrap-up of the Monday Government Oversight meeting (click here). And an article just appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian detailing the ramifications of Friday's meeting (click here).
You're doing good, Kimo.
UPDATE: The RFP (Request for Proposal) has just been issued by the Department of Telecommunications, etc., and it's being universally reviewed as an inadequate disaster. Go to Kimo's blog (click here) for more information.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors have a number of committees that meet weekly or bimonthly and though a few have simple names like "The Land Use Committee," most of the others have convoluted titles like the "Government Audit and Oversight Committee."
The latter had a meeting on Monday afternoon, December the 12th.
There were a number of agenda items, but the one creating the most interest was an examination into the public process surrounding a potentially huge civic project creating a free wireless internet network, which had been proposed by Mayor Newsom in conjunction with Google, the internet Goliath.
The problem was that there was little to no public input into the very rushed process, and so the three supervisors on the committee -- Chris Daly, Sean Elsbernd, and Aaron Peskin -- were being asked to grill the director of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services.
Chris Vein, above, was appointed by Newsom to be the "acting" director in May of this year. He's a smooth character who worked at the White House for a number of administrations doing god knows what, and he makes a point of secrecy even though at the hearing he denied that this was his modus operandi.
In other words, it smelled rather as if a fix was already in.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time that has happened in San Francisco.
Even though there were the usual non-profit types at the hearing, looking to consolidate their bit of power while blabbing on about the "digital divide"...
...the real digital divide was between the passionately committed geeks who had a visionary, utopian vision of the future and everyone else who had no idea what they were talking about, and who were stuck in very old ruts of how things are done.
One of the best articles on this local issue was in the Bay Guardian recently by Camille T. Taiara and Matthew Hirsch (click here), and it's worth reading in full. They quote Tim Pozar, pictured above.
"In the past corporations have had a bad track record on addressing digital divide issues," explained Tim Pozar, cofounder of the Bay Area Wireless Users Group, which has long been rebelling against the big telecommunications companies by setting up free WiFi nodes in different parts of the city.
Media democracy advocates worry that Newsom is taking a backward approach to reaching his stated goals. The city must figure out what the community wants TechConnect to do before it can determine how the network should be built.
"Wireless is just one medium out there," Pozar said by way of example. Fiber-optic cable performs better than WiFi for video streaming, he explained. That would be an important consideration if, say, San Francisco's public access TV stations wanted to use the network to reach residents who don't subscribe to cable, or if they chose to broadcast Board of Supervisors' meetings so that people could watch them from their work desks.
Indeed, San Franciscans shouldn't be limited to using the network only to receive content, they say.
About three months ago, Kimo Crossman, a San Francisco freelance software developer between jobs, decided to find out what was up with the proposed WiFi project, mostly out of enthusiastic interest.
He asked for a bit of information from the Department of Telecommunications, Etc. and was stonewalled, which annoyed him.
So he declared war on San Francisco bureaucracy and in the process of shining a light on what was actually going on with the RFP (Request for Proposal), he's spurred on a whole group of geeks who may actually help get this project done right.
To get to Part Two of the article, click here.
On Tuesday the 13th at 4PM, there was a small demonstration at the corner of McAllister and Franklin Streets over the execution of Tookie Williams at San Quentin the night before.
There were about 50 protestors and twenty media people...
...which felt bizarre...
...an example of a manufactured media op(portunity)...
...at its most brazen.
One has to give the oganizers credit (click here to see who they are) for getting such a large turnout, however, from the mainstream press.
I'm opposed to the death penalty on two grounds: one, that innocent people have been and continue to be executed; and two, execution by the state is murder in my name and I actually take the Ten Commandment injunction "Thou shalt not kill" seriously.
James Wolcott wrote the following yesterday:
"I held out the fugitive hope that the moderate side of Schwarzenegger might prevail as his wife tugged him in the direction of leniency and mercy. What a fool I am. Whatever Maria Shriver said or didn't say was of no consequence, nor were the pleas for clemency from citizens, famous and obscure alike, who felt Williams had done enough good over the last twenty years to deserve having his life spared.
The death penalty must be abolished. No former movie action hero--or Yale cheerleader with enough psychological baggage to sink the African Queen--should be entrusted with the power of life and death over his fellow citizens. These are essentially frivolous, uninformed men playacting blue-suited roles of grave responsibility. And, no, I don't think Bill Clinton should have executed Ricky Ray Rector either. Capital punishment must be de-politicized, and as long as politicians make the final decision, depoliticization is impossible. So abolish it."
There is a scatalogical, nasty piece of work in the blogosphere who accurately bills himself as "The Rude Pundit" (click here to get to his site). On occasion, he's one of the most brilliant ranters on the internet and that's saying something. Here's a few excerpts from his take on the California governor:
"Man, the Rude Pundit wants Arnold Schwarzenegger to be in charge of all decisions of life or death. He wants that deep thinkin' demi-Nazi to walk from cell to cell at San Quentin and mark a chalk X outside each door. Because Arnold Schwarzenegger is just who we all want tellin' us who should live or die, who deserves mercy and who deserves death. Goddamn, what an easy world it'll be havin' Arnold Schwarzenegger make all those decisions.
Fuck, let's not limit Arnold Schwarzenegger to the executable on death row; send Arnold Schwarzenegger into hospitals so he can give the thumbs up or thumbs down to each person on life support."
"Who's been indirectly responsible for more violence since the early 1980s, Tookie or the Terminator? Tough question, no?
For, if nothing else, the Williams case has laid clear the absurdity of the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you spend your life acting like an amoral, gun-firing buffoon, why should anyone expect you to act differently as the governor? That would require an act of clemency by the voting public, that might require you to say you wanted to redeem yourself for your past sins."
"And the most disheartening thing of all was how little was mentioned, in the cruel march to the death chamber, of how the ex-wife of one of Williams' alleged victims, Albert Owens (whose family is entirely fucked-up in conflict over the execution), called for support of Williams' efforts to redeem himself for his gang-building past: "I, Linda Owens want to build upon Mr. Williams' peace initiative. I invite Mr. Williams to join me in sending a message to all communities that we should all unite in peace. This position of peace would honor my husband's memory and Mr. Williams work."
"A call for peace to honor the dead? What fuckin' country does Linda Owens think she's living in? Not in George Bush's America, where more must die in Iraq to make sure the dead are honored. And certainly not in Arnold Schwarzenegger's California."
At one point during the media op protest in front of the California Public Utilities Commission building, this gentleman started an elaborate call-and-response chant with the crowd. "Hi-hi-ho-ho, the death penalty's gotta go" was one section, if I remember correctly.
For a more nuanced take on the whole subject, Alan Maass from The Socialist Worker has a great post up on "Counterpunch." Click here to read it.
