The MobileActive.org community is up in arms over a subpoena issued by the New York City law department against TXTmob, a US-based group messaging service that helped mount protests during the 2004 Republican National Convention.
Authorities are itching to get hold of the identities of those who used the service during the 2004 protests that grabbed US news headlines.
TXTmob describes itself this way:
TXTmob was first developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National Convention in New York. Tad Hirsch, a researcher in MIT’s Smart Cities Group continues to offer TXTmob as a free service to the general public, and is currently coordinating a major software upgrade.
MobileActive.org has called called the issuance of the subpoena against TXTmob “a blow to privacy and a chilling development to activists”. I agree.
We in TXTPower have expressed to Tad and the TXTmob crew that we support them and that we strongly denounce the threat to the right to privacy of users of the service. More importantly, the subpoena threatens to terrorize people into not using mobile technology for mass actions.
We hope TXTmob will be solidly defiant, and that Americans join them to defend privacy rights and civil liberties. This is an opportunity for the US activist and mobileactivist communities to come together and mobilize because at stake here is the very future of mobileactivism.
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