The biggest Allowed Cloud I ever violated (a blast from the past)

After the past few days' experiences, I'm even less likely to buckle to the Far Right than before. But even a decade ago, when it appeared that the NKU thought police, the Contract With America, and the Internet censorship racket had me beaten, there was a strong glimmer of Allowed Cloud violatin'.

Though the fascists prevented me from getting my degree, I wanted to use my radio/TV major for something. So in Highland Heights, Kentucky, in 1997 I started Tantrum 95.7. Yes, a pirate radio station! Late that year I moved to Bellevue because of events resulting from the area's overdevelopment, and my 1-watt station operated sporadically for the next couple years.

I invented a nifty system of cassette automation to use for the station. It was cheap and primitive, but it seemed to work for the moment. Later of course it became automated by MP3's. Around early 2000, Tantrum 95.7 adopted a broadly based music format (with some indie product) interspersed with commentaries at :15 and :45 of each hour. (Some of the music was copied to MP3's from scratchy 45 RPM records.) It operated almost daily for 12 hours.

The signal covered much of Dayton, Kentucky, and made it as far as Columbia Parkway in Cincinnati.

I knew that running a pirate radio station is as illegal as bubble gum in Singapore, but who cares? The FCC, that's who.

I honestly did not think I would ever get busted by the FCC over a 1-watt station. I was afraid the building owner might raise a stink, but then I figured that as long as the FCC didn't mind, who else would, other than greedy licensed stations who were livid that I was "stealing" their listeners by offering a superior product? Tantrum 95.7 didn't hurt anyone, other than the feewinghurt suffered by licensed stations when I took their listeners.

September 28, 2001, was the day Tantrum 95.7 faced the music. The phone rang. I picked it up, and it was a woman at the FCC's Detroit field office.

Welp, that was the end of Tantrum 95.7.

It turned out that 2 days earlier, FCC agents had made a 300-mile trip here from Detroit to place an orange tag on the door demanding that I call them. I didn't find the tag until after the call, because it had blown into the side yard. It amazed me that the government had wasted gas by sending a van all the way here just to shut me down.

Suspiciously, when I posted a message about the raid on the Cincinnati radio Internet board (which I had just been made moderator of), the entire board was shut down almost immediately. (This is a separate incident from my later complaint about the raid that cost me my account on another board, which was run by thin-skinned Nazis.)

Tantrum 95.7 wouldn't have gotten raided except for its political views. I'm certain of that. Why was the KKK allowed to run a pirate radio station for 15 years that jammed licensed stations, while my station only lasted 4 years even though I went out of my way to find an empty spot on the dial?

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I got the paperwork about the complaint that led to my station's closure - though some of the most vital information in this 30-page document had been blacked out. So, after 7 years, I have yet to determine exactly who complained about my station. I'm absolutely certain it was one of the big Cincinnati station owners, and since the local radio industry was already a near-monopoly, that narrows it down significantly.

This proved that corporate radio execs spent more time fighting competitors like me than in improving their own stations - which were horrible.

What's worse is that their complaint against me was made on September 19, 2001. This shows how trivial, trifling, and unpatriotic they are. They could have been out giving blood or putting together charity drives, but instead they were firing off letters to their attorneys to get them to sic the FCC on me. If they were real Americans, they would have at least chosen a different time to go crying about my station.

The paperwork also revealed that Tantrum 95.7 had already been ratted out in 1999 but that the FCC was so inept that it went searching for me in Highland Heights instead of Bellevue.

If something like this happened now, I would've fought the First Church of Censorship. I might not have continued broadcasting, but I would've made damn sure the FCC and its corporate puppeteers looked like even more of a laughingstock than they did.

And I still plan on finding out who snitched. Come hell or high water, I will get the answer, even if I have to wait until I'm 90.