PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Community groups organized by the Thomas Merton Center, including anti-war, religious and social-justice organizations held a demonstration to support healthcare for all at Centre City Tower, Smithfield & 7th Street on Friday, October 8 at 8:15AM. "Thousands of people in Allegheny County and millions across the country are facing the same struggle as the nine janitors who were tossed out of Centre City Tower. These janitors lost their job because they were going to receive affordable family health insurance under their new union contract. The rising cost of healthcare is tearing apart this community," says Tim Vining, Executive Director of the Thomas Merton Center.

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Previous coverage: [ Justice for Janitors mass arrests | CMU rally for benefits for janitors | August HealthCareNotWarfare rally ]
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Thursday morning, authorities issued a federal order to Internet Service Provider Rackspace ordering them to hand over information hosted on Indymedia web servers to the FBI. Rackspace, which provides hosting services for more that 20 Indymedia sites at its London facility, complied by turning over two Indymedia servers to federal authorities, effectively removing those sites from the internet.

Indymedia, a global network of independent non-corporate media organizations, had been asked last month by the FBI to remove a story about Swiss undercover police from one of the websites hosted at Rackspace. It is not known, however, whether Thursday's order is related to that incident since the order was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia. According to Rackspace, they "cannot provide Indymedia with any information regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders in similar situations which prevent them from informing concerned parties about what is happening. This represents the most serious attack yet on Indymedia's infrastructure by government authorities.

[ Read More | Indymedia FBI page | Indymedia Oct 11 press release ]

Beaten to death by 5 police officers in the Overbrook section of Pittsburgh on October 12th, 1995, the case of Jonny Gammage divided Allegheny County and shocked people across the world. From the beginning race was a central issue. The five police officers implicated in Gammage's death were all white. Gammage was black. Although a racially-mixed coroner's jury unanimously voted to indict all five officers, the first time that a police officer was ever indicted in Allegheny County, the eventual criminal trials were by jurors imported from the whitest corners of the State. Outrage at the outcome of the case -- two mistrials and one not-guilty verdict -- caused the City of Pittsburgh to create the Citizen's Police Review Board. Years later, the echoes of the case still shape city race-relations and the lack of trust that many residents of Pittsburgh have for the police.

October marks an important month for organizing against police brutality. In addition to the 9th anniversary of the Gammage Case, October 22 is designated a "national day of protest to stop police brutality, repression and the criminalization of a generation." Over 20 cities are participating. In Pittsburgh, People Against Police Violence has called for a 4pm rally and march to bring awareness to the ongoing regional cases of Charles Dixon, Bernard Rogers, Michael Ellerbe, and Damian Jordan: all cases of black men and youth whose deaths the police bear responsibility for.

[ Jonny Gammage Retrospective] [ Interview with Pete Shell ] [ People Against Police Violence ] [ October 22nd Coalition ]
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Electronic voting machine maker Diebold, Inc., on September 30th was ordered to pay damages to the San Franciso Bay-Area IMC (Indybay)'s internet service provider, OPG, as well as students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, for falsely threatening both under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

The false charges originated in September of 2003, when some 13,000 internal Diebold memos that suggested that the company's voting machines were flawed were widely circulated, on the San Francisco Bay Area website, by the students at Swarthmore, and other IMCs including Pittsburgh IMC. The US District Court judge who made the decision said that not only had Diebold misused the DMCA, "Plaintiff's and IndyMedia's use [ of the documents ] was transformative: they used the email archive to support criticism that is in the public interest."

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On Tuesday, October 5, 56 Pittsburgh public transit users and activists packed into a bus and took their case to the state capital. Stressing the need to pass Senate Bill 1162 and its companion House Bill 2697 to increase state funding for public transit, they met with a number of representatives and forced legistlators to look public transit users in the eye.

[ read more | photo | audio | Sept 13 rally | Save Our Transit website ]