Creative direct action ideas

[Moorlock]

 One clever cracker  broke into the Yahoo! News web site and started altering  the wire stories that appeared there:

    [Adrian] Lamo tampered with Yahoo!'s copy of a Reuters story that described a delay in [Dmitry] Sklyarov's court proceedings, so that the text reported, incorrectly, that the Russian was facing the death penalty.

    The modified story warned sardonically that Sklyarov's work raised "the haunting specter of inner-city minorities with unrestricted access to literature, and through literature, hope."

    The text went on to report that Attorney General John Ashcroft held a press conference about the case before "cheering hordes", and incorrectly quoted Ashcroft as saying, "They shall not overcome. Whoever told them that the truth shall set them free was obviously and grossly unfamiliar with federal law."...

    The hacker provided SecurityFocus with a screen shot showing an August 10th Reuters story about a Senate committee's report on the National Security Agency. The screen shot shows the story on Yahoo! News with a false quote attributed to the report: "Rebuilding the NSA is the committee's top priority. In partnership with AOL Time Warner, we fully expect to bring you a service you can't refuse."

Another clever htmlerator exploited a quirk in how web browsers interpret web page addresses to make his page look as though it were appearing on CNN's own site. Amazingly enough, "CNN.com unwittingly helped perpetuate the hoax by directing users to the external bogus report; this made 'Singer Britney Spears Killed in Car Accident' the 'Most Popular' story credited to CNN.com, without it ever actually residing on the news site's pages."

Crackers also hit the USA Today website — adding stories about a new White House propaganda minister and about the Pope admitting Christianity to be bunk.

The Falun Gong movement took things up a notch by hijacking the satellite feed of one of China's largest television stations to broadcast Falun Gong propaganda.

And Army Newswatch, a TV show produced by the U.S. Army was hijacked one day in Webster, New York, by twenty minutes of hardcore gay porn.

And who can forget the day "a clandestine broadcaster in a Max Headroom mask broke into two TV shows in Chicago... [and] uttered various profundities... before pulling his pants down and allowing a confederate to spank him with a flyswatter."

http://sniggle.net/nto.php
http://web.archive.org/web/20011217004512/http://www.securityfocus.com/news/254
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/10_900811
http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2002/07/12/20020712_194628_mattusa.htm
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=776
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/118342.html

[Moorlock]

When 60 Minutes reporters arrived at an "autonomous youth center" in Zurich to report on the radical youth scene there, a crew from the center captured them, tied them up, and covered them with paint — all the while video-taping the events.

Then they released the crew and went on to sell the video tape to CBS.

http://sniggle.net/nto.php

[Moorlock]

Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter-to-the-editor  back in 1790 in which he claimed to have found a well-reasoned defense of slavery remarkably similar to a recent speech by Senator Jackson - only this defense was written in 1687 by one Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim to justify the enslavement of white Christians in Algeria.

http://sniggle.net/historicus.php

[Moorlock]

In 1983 a tape recording  of a telephone conversation between U.S. government president Ronald Reagan and British government prime minister Margaret Thatcher was sent anonymously to newspapers; a cover letter claimed that the recordings were the result of a crossed line. London's Sunday Times and the San Francisco Chronicle covered the story, with the Times  following the lead of the U.S. State Department, which described the tapes as part of "an increasingly sophisticated Russian disinformation campaign." The tapes were actually the work of the punk rock group Crass who made them by splicing together bits of speeches made by the two politicians that were recorded from news broadcasts.

http://sniggle.net/crass.php

[Moorlock]

The Yes Men managed to sneak a fake spokesperson  for Dow Chemicals onto the BBC World Television news show, on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, to announce that Dow would liquidate its Union Carbide subsidiary and use the proceeds to compensate the victims and clean up the site. Then, they issued a fake retraction, which also caught some news organizations unawares.

They also fooled CNBC by posing one of their talented members as a spokesperson for the World Trade Organization. He went on to debate an anti-globalization protester by mimicing a dogmatic free-marketeer: "Markets are still the answer no matter what the cost. For example, a market in human rights violations can allow countries that want to abuse people to buy 'Justice Vouchers' from those who don't."

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=313
http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow/
http://www.dowethics.com/r/about/corp/bbc.htm
http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/cnbc/index.shtml

[Moorlock]

An anonymous poet managed to hide the phrase "Li Peng Step Down!" in the characters of a patriotic poem in the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper.

http://sniggle.net/snicker.php

[Moorlock]

The Veterans of Future Wars was founded at Princeton University in 1936 to parody the bottom-line patriotism of organized veterans groups. Eventually the group would claim 50,000 members in chapters on hundreds of campuses:

    "Their first manifesto in the Princetonian argued that sooner or later there would be another war and that it would only be an act of justice for Congress to grant a $1000 cash bonus to all men between the ages of 18 and 36. Legally the bonus would be payable in 1965, but since Congress seemed bent on paying bonuses before they were due, the actual payment date should be June 1936, with, of course, an additional 3 percent annual interest compounded back from 1965 to 1936. In this way the future veterans would receive their benefits while all were still alive to enjoy them. A national salute was adopted, a modified version of the then famous Fascist greeting: an arm held straight out in the direction of Washington, the palm turned up receptively."

http://etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/veterams_future_wars.html

[Moorlock]

The photographs of Iraqi prisoners abused at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib (or its Orwellian pseudonym: "Camp Redemption") were more than evidence — they were potent icons, pictures that told more than thousands of words.

And war critics did what they could to keep the American public from turning away from those icons — by putting reminders here and there and elsewhere in public view.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0517-05.htm
http://gizmodo.com/archives/strip-pix-burn-iraq-009574.php
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/08/prisoner_statue_smug.html

[Moorlock]

When orwellian antihero John Poindexter was assigned to head up the United States government's Total Information Awareness project, an unorganized group of pranksters decided to give Admiral Poindexter a taste of what total information awareness feels like from the other side.

They found his home phone number and address, and posted this information — along with a link to a satellite photo of his house — far and wide on the internet.

It all started when Matt Smith, a columnist for the SF Weekly, wrote an article about Poindexter's new intelligence bureau, that read, in part:

   " ...I dialed John and Linda Poindexter's number — (301) 424-6613 -- at their home at 10 Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md... Why... is their $269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered with artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn't a Reagan conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years? Is the Donald Douglas Poindexter listed in Maryland sex-offender records any relation to the good admiral? What do Tom Maxwell, at 8 Barrington Fare, and James Galvin, at 12 Barrington Fare, think of their spooky neighbor? ...For those of you revolutionaries with private investigator friends, ask for even more sensitive information on Reagan's former national security adviser. I'd be glad to publish anything readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally. "

Visit the John Poindexter Awareness Office for more Information.
http://web.archive.org/web/20040402014449/http://www.breakyourchains.org/jpao.htm

[Moorlock]

In India, Nanjunda Swamy has extended the work of his countryman Mohandas Gandhi with something he calls "laughing satyagraha":

    Earlier this year Mr. Nanjunda Swamy gathered 50,000 farmers to sit outside the state secretariat and tried to "laugh the Government out." They had tried all the usual forms of nonviolent protest — sit-ins, blockades, refusing to pay taxes, picketing, blockading roads — but the State Government remained unmoved by the farmers' plea for land reforms and an increase in produce prices. The farmers' only reward was getting arrested or shot.

    The farmers, surrounded by policemen, just sat on the lawn outside the Government building and told jokes against Mr. Bangarappa. And the jokes? "They were puns, actually," Mr. Nanjunda Swamy said. After warming up the farmers with a little word-play, it was enough simply to say "Bangarappa!" over the megaphone and the farmers would shake with laughter. The police made no arrests ("How could they? All we did was laugh") and no public property was damaged. "It's as easy to make people laugh as to make them angry. Laughter can be a very powerful weapon against the Government," Mr. Nanjunda Swamy said.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050217164043/http://www.uq.net.au/~zzdkeena/NvT/30/30.6.txt

Don't try that trick in Belarus, though! A group of "flash mob" practitioners there designed a "smile mob" — they were all to "come to central square and wander around smiling." That's it. Or was, until 100 riot cops showed up and arrested them.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/05/belarus_smile_mob_or.html

[Moorlock]

Mark Thomas  has been described as "Michael Moore meets Sy Hersh. But way  more pissed off." His projects have included:

    leading protests, giving out leading spies' cell phone numbers, launching one-man WMD inspections, showing up at a Nestle factory "dressed as a huge teddy bear, and then produc[ing] a huge ghetto-blaster playing Zimbabwe's health minister making serious allegations about Nestle's baby-milk marketing methods."

For an encore, he exposed illegal arms merchants by helping "a bunch of teenaged schoolgirls set up an online arms dealership" that managed to negotiate for tanks, grenade launchers and torture equipment.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/05/peace_prankster_mark.html

[Moorlock]

The right wing magazine FrontPage is up in arms over an anarchist urban assault vehicle being underwritten as a "performance art" piece by a foundation grant and promoted by a Kansas City art space. That vehicle, the "Tactical Ice Cream Unit" is a project of the Center for Tactical Magic.

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22089
http://www.grandarts.com/exhibits/CenterTacticalMagic.html
http://www.tacticalmagic.org/CTM/project%20pages/TICU.htm

[Moorlock]

 Paul Mavrides reports:

    in 1969 at Akron University, some friends and I got together and decided to stage a Vietnam War protest. We announced we were going to burn a puppy to death with homemade napalm to demonstrate just how horrible napalm burns are. We anticipated attracting a large crowd of outraged people who would show up to stop it, whereupon you announce, "There is no puppy. There's no napalm. How can you people justify showing up to save a dog, when there's an actual war going on and this napalm is being used on actual people?" So you embarrass them and make them feel guilty — make 'em stop and think....

The Los Angeles Cacophony Society pulled a similar stunt more recently, posting flyers claiming "We Will Kill Our Pets To Protest the War." Mavrides continues:

    In Berkeley some people... replaced the "WHAT TO DO IN AN EMERGENCY" pictograms on BART with their own version telling what to do in case of nuclear attack. They detailed a whole procedure for living in a BART car after the attack, giving advice like, "Reserve one car to isolate all the bodies in." Even if most of the daily commuters didn't notice it, the few who did were probably put off balance for the rest of the day.

Terry Fox tells of a similarly-intended provocation:

    In front of the museum was a large garden of jasmine plants, which bloom once every seven years. They had been growing for six years and were due to blossom soon. During the opening of the exhibition Fox cremated these plants with a flame-thrower of the type used in Vietnam to provide the wealthy people who regularly enjoyed the garden with a concrete example of the type of action they supported with their dollars and their complacency. I burned the whole thing with a flamethrower, and it just left a slight border of these plants, and they ended up having to dig them all out, it destroyed them. So, then, the next day when these people came to have their lunch there, it was just a burned-out plot, you know. I mean, it was the same thing that they were doing in Vietnam. Nobody would get excited about napalming Vietnam, but you burn some flowers that they like to sit near, and it's like...

http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles/X0037_Mavrides_Pranks_Inte.html
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/stop-the-war-or-the-dogs-get-it/2950/

[Moorlock]

In 2001, all 273 members of South Korea's parliament received packages  in the mail containing "human excrement." One wit remarked that at least in South Korea, when it comes to politics, people still give a shit.

Which reminds me of Ales Pushkin, a performance artist from Belarus, who was arrested in 1999 for "malicious hooliganism" and "disgracing state symbols" for pushing a wheelbarrow of manure up to the presidential administration building and shoveling out the contents.

At the outbreak of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, protesters in San Francisco staged a vomit-in at the Federal Building to demonstrate how the war made them feel.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010331194259/http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_240769.html?menu=news.quirkies
http://www.ilhr.org/ilhr/regional/belarus/updates/2002/27_02.htm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2003/03/20/heaving.DTL

[Moorlock]

There's a hoax doing the rounds that claims that the United States Internal Revenue Service is giving tax refunds to African-Americans in a program of reparations for the institution of slavery in America. It's not true. But that's not really accurate, either, since in 2000 and 2001, the IRS  mistakenly paid out over thirty million dollars  to people claiming this hoax tax credit!

The Germans picked a starker response to the tax man. In 2002, they started the "last shirt for Schröder" campaign — tens of thousands of Germans dramatizing that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was taxing the shirts off of their backs by mailing their shirts directly to his office.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2563061.stm