There was an earlier diary post about Steve Kurtz, an artist detained by the FBI in Buffalo for suspicion of bio-terrorism. I write to give some more background about Kurtz and his art group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and to urge dKos to support their legal defense fund. Kurtz's wife, Hope Kurtz, passed away from a heart attack in their home, where authorities found art materials they mistook for bio-weapons.
In seeking charges against these artists, the FBI is seeking charges against an influential group of social activists and theorists. To put things in perspective: I regularly teach courses on civil disobedience, where students study CAE alongside Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and ACT-UP. The significance of CAE: digitizing and globalizing civil disobedience.
Kossacks might be especially interested in CAE's first two books (available free online), The Electronic Disturbance and Electronic Civil Disobedience, both from the mid-1990s. In them, CAE argues that in becoming electronic, power has gone nomadic and virtual, thus making traditional civil disobedience increasingly ineffective. CAE thus calls for developing electronic forms of civil disobedience. Significantly, a more recent CAE text, Digital Resistance, contains a chapter that analyzes the increasing tendency in public discourse to treat civil disobedience as a form of terrorism. Patriot Acts I and II, as many folks know, introduce measures to counter "domestic terrorism": I suspect CAE may be looking at such charges.
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