The Associated Press
02.05.05

Knoxville, Tenn. - After warnings, inspections and finally a raid, 90.9 FM
is silent.

Knoxville First Amendment Radio, or KFAR, was an unapologetic voice of
unlicensed "pirate radio" activism, freewheeling conversation, alternative
news and music since 2001.

But Federal Communications Commission agents and U.S. marshals emptied the
station's graffiti-decorated trailer - a former crack house on a hilltop
near the University of Tennessee - of radio gear Sept. 14. A poster of Che
Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, remains on a control room wall.

"Arrrgh! .... ye scoundrels!" flashed the message board on the station's Web
site.

"All the FCC did was protect Knoxvillians' right to listen to static. You go
there now, and it is nothing," supporter Chris Irwin said of the void on the
FM dial once occupied by 100-watt KFAR. "What exactly was the public benefit
of crushing this station with less power than a light bulb?"

Two weeks later, Free Radio Santa Cruz in California was raided after
operating for nearly 10 years without a license. The FCC shut down 250
pirate radio stations of all kinds in 2004, up from 211 the year before. San
Francisco Liberation Radio and tiny Radio Free Brattleboro in Vermont, both
raided in 2003, continue to wage federal court battles to stay on the air.

The closings come even as the FCC considers allowing more low-power FM
licenses for community radio.

Of some 3,200 applications submitted during very brief filing periods in
2000 and 2001, about 1,100 have been granted construction permits, about 260
applications are still pending, and more than 300 stations have been
licensed.

"I fully support the mission of the hundreds of LPFM providers throughout
the country," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said in a statement. "Low-power FM
stations offer a unique opportunity to serve citizens through noncommercial
community-based stations, stations that allow small communal and parochial
interests to find a voice."

But KFAR never applied for a license. The loose-knit collection of about 50
mostly college-age disc jockeys kept KFAR going on $10-a-month dues. They
used on-air pseudonyms like Black-Eyed Susan and Dingo Dog Dave to avoid
fines.

"Originally, we were going to apply for a license. We had a nonprofit. We
had a board. We were filling out the paperwork," said Irwin, a law student
at Tennessee.

But after the FCC opened the door to low-power FM licenses in 2000, Congress
adopted restrictions urged by traditional broadcasters. The National
Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio wanted to ensure the
signals of the new little stations didn't interfere with big existing ones.
So under a so-called "third adjacent channel" rule, no new station could be
closer than three positions on the dial from an existing station.

"Basically it made it so that really low-power stations could only operate
in very rural areas where there weren't listeners, so they wouldn't cut into
any major markets," said Dylan Wrynn, otherwise known as Pete triDish, a
former radio pirate now with the Prometheus Radio Project in Philadelphia,
which advises community radio startups.

"Maybe they could have gotten a low-power station, but it is really pretty
dubious," Wrynn said of KFAR. "There are about a dozen ways they could have
been stopped from doing it legally through really no fault of their own."

The Knoxville market isn't huge. It ranked 71st-largest in the country in
the latest Arbitron ratings with a population of 620,000. But with 21 FM
stations on the air, the dial apparently was full under the third-channel
adjacency standard.

So in late 2001 KFAR started broadcasting anyway as an act of civil
disobedience.

Two years later, an independent study commissioned by the FCC for Congress
concluded the third-channel rule was overreaching.

The FCC proposed going back to its original plan of requiring separation by
only two clicks on the FM dial instead of three - a standard that could
allow hundreds of additional stations.

Legislation to make the change, sponsored by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and
Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., stalled in the Senate last fall.
Tim Berry, chief engineer for five Knoxville radio stations once owned
locally but sold to Citadel Broadcasting Corp. of Las Vegas in 2000, has no
sympathy for KFAR, even though the pirate station never interfered with his
stations' signals.

"If you dance to the music, eventually you are going to have to pay the
fiddler. If you fire up a radio station illegally without a license,
eventually the commission is going to shut you down," he said.

"If the (McCain-Leahy) legislation were passed ... yes, I believe there
would be some more (stations) that would be eligible," Berry said, but
noted, "There already are some low-power FMs on, and they did so legally.
They didn't fire up and get mad when they got shut down."

The FCC closed KFAR on a complaint from the FBI.

Special Agent R. Joe Clark, who heads the FBI's Knoxville office, sent the
FCC a letter about KFAR in January 2004. The FBI refused to release Clark's
letter to the Associated Press without a formal Freedom of Information Act
request to Washington.
Knoxville FBI spokesman Gary Kidder said Clark was only passing on a tip to
the appropriate agency from the FBI's local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

David Icove, a former FBI Academy instructor now working for the Tennessee
Valley Authority's police agency, is a member of the task force. He played a
small role in the KFAR probe. Icove listened to the radio in April and June
to confirm that KFAR was still on the air after FCC warnings, according to
an affidavit from FCC investigator Eric Rice.

But the FCC complaint simply says the station was closed for being
unlicensed after it was warned and tests determined the station was
transmitting at 5,935 times the allowable limit. Its signal could be picked
up from more than five miles away, the FCC said. A licensed low-power FM
station typically reaches about 3.5 miles.

Since the shutdown, KFAR has continued an abbreviated broadcast on the
Internet under a new name, Community Radio of Knoxville, or CRoK, and looks
for other opportunities.

"KFAR is going to continue to survive as an idea," Irwin said, "until we can
figure out some way of getting the people of Knoxville access to what
belongs to them - our airwaves."

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=14793

"Mike Terry" wrote in message
...

Knoxville First Amendment Radio, or KFAR, was an unapologetic voice of
unlicensed "pirate radio" activism, freewheeling conversation, alternative
news and music since 2001.

Ahh, nice to hear their Dept of Humanities is still going strong!


Az.