[Photo above shows Stephen Dunifer, 1993 Berkeley, taken from his website, address below.]
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Published news story by Lurene Kathleen Helzer, June 21, 1993, East Bay Phoenix Journal, “Radio Free Berkeley fined $20,000”. Story about underground Berkeley micro-power broadcaster Stephen Dunifer, founder of Free Radio Berkeley, being in big trouble with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission because of his illegal broadcasts. Why would Dunifer have been the subject of so much local attention in 1993?
The broadcaster was doing protest shows from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Berkeley’s City Hall and far-left radio station KPFA’s offices in downtown Berkeley. (Dunifer said he felt KPFA was compromising its original, leftist ideals born in the Cold War/Vietnam War years. Of course, this is both impossible and amusing; many in the Bay Area still joke in 2009 that Berkeley’s KPFA remains somewhere to the left of Karl Marx.)
Whatever his platform, Dunifer was risking sizable financial penalties from the American FCC in 1993 because of his so-dubbed “pirate” radio broadcasts. The FCC said illegal broadcasts risked jamming aircraft navigation systems, for example, so the airwaves had to remain strictly regulated.
Pirate broadcasters like Dunifer argued that there was plenty of open broadcast area of the AM and FM bands of 1993, that the costs of radio broadcasting were needlessly prohibitive to the broader community. Pirate broadcasters believe this to be an opportunity cost, that it essentially contradicts the goal of free speech, ultimately serves to gag the opinions of those on pirate shows.
Who was being allegedly gagged? Black Liberation Radio in Chicago was one group that became relatively known in illegal broadcasting.
Such media earned this tag originally because illegal radio broadcasters often worked their controls off the European coasts of World War II. They worked in stealth in order to embarrass or influence their target populations, i.e., the Germans trapped inside Germany during the Nazi years. In later decades, pirate radio broadcasts could be heard by enslaved populations of the Cold War.
Today, it’s a far different debate because of the internet’s ubiquity. Mr. Dunifer, though, continues to strongly support regulatory reform for radio in 2009, and can be found online at “freeradio.org”.
In June of 1993, when I was sent out by the paper to meet Stephen Dunifer for this story, I could hardly believe the happenings right before me. The events weren’t staged. Some people were indeed excited about an illegal broadcasting movement in the Bay Area:
Amidst a background of leftist posters from the Cold War era, a man in Khaki shorts shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“I just came to buy your $35 transmitter, but if I have to sit through the whole meeting, that’s okay, too,” the man blurted.
Dunifer replied he could not sell him an assembled kit, because it would only put him in further trouble with the FCC.
“Well, take a couple knobs off,” the man answered impatiently.
Dunifer said it would still be illegal.
No longer able to control himself, the man picked up the equipment, slapped $40 on the shelf as a “donation,” and made for the door, saying if he couldn’t legally buy the stuff, he’d ‘steal’ it.
Radio transmitters for illegal broadcasting are hot right now and getting hotter, it seems.
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