Who: My friend Ava Haney who actively participated in the Seattle WTO protests.

Origins:  The news one day says that Seattle is going to hell, this sparks interest. 

	"POLICE ATTACK PROTESTERS AT SEATTLE WTO MEETING"
	"THOUSANDS PROTEST WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION MEETING IN SEATTLE"
	I immediately thought of my good friend, Ava Haney, who is currently in college at Lewis & Clark in Portland, OR.  Ava had been going to Seattle to protest specifically against the Third Ministerial Meeting of the WTO, and I knew about this from a phone conversation earlier in the week.  The headlines sitting in a street corner newspaper stand immediately drew panic.
	When I'd realized that the media I'd been seeing had no inclination of reporting an unbiased account of the protest, because in the larger capitalism picture it was effectively they who were being attacked, I began to worry more.  There were already accounts of some violence, and these reports assured that it was the protesters who were the aggressors.  If this was so then there was a definitive chance that counter-measures would be used by the Seattle police force, of which all 1,300 had been mobilized to the downtown center where organizers were forming a human chain around the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.
	I called Portland.  I left a message on her machine at college, and then checked to see if she might've been home.  Her mother sounded worried. 
	"I don't know but I think she's coming back tommorow."
	"Thanks, Ms. Haney."
	The next day I checked and Ava was there.  I asked her what happened.  
	"Sean, I don't want you to believe what those newspapers are saying.  The only sources I've found that give an accurate report are the New York Times and a website called Indymedia.com."
	"Allright.  But, what did you see?"
	"There are picutres.  Here's the address."
	I went to a website created by an independent Italian photographer who happened to be in Seattle at the time.  His accounts were by far the most graphic and dramatically honest.  I decided to find more information, but upon surfing through the usual mass media outlets, AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, and newspaper websites across the nation, I discovered pictures of smiling WTO conference members, statues covered in snow outside the meeting center, reports that the conference was actually proceeding well. I’d none of the kind of pictures I'd been told about by Ava.  The Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT) which was responsible for organizing the WTO meeting to take place in Seattle has on the first page of its website, a distinctly ambiguious headline, "The lessons of the past year are proving invaluable to the Council as we steer our way into 2000 with increased demands for up-to-date and accurate information."
	It was at this point that I realized that there was a genuine kind of campaign here to assert damage control, and this campaign would be waged by the WTO against the protesters, and that it was to the WTO’s advantage that half of the global media market was being represented or sponsored at Seattle. This was the most important meeting on free trade and global capitalism, and this was one of the reasons that it attracted its almost 60s-era demonstration. But this also meant that my research needed to enter less “credible” venues.  I needed first hand sources, and so I decided to contact Ava again.
	But she was across the country in Oregon and I needed to contact her.  It proved near impossible.  The experience at Seattle had gotten her involved in more activism, and I’d even received some emails asking for solidarity.  One mail had the e-mail addresses and telephone numbers for the office of Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, and Washington State Governor Gary Locke, as well as a sample letter demanding the release of the 600 protestors being held.  

SAMPLE EMAIL (cut and paste into new message) - or express your outrage in
your own words!

Dear Mayor Schell/Governor Locke/Police Chief Stamperg,

	I am shocked and outraged to see the atrocious way your administration has treated the tens of thousands of non-violent anti-WTO protesters.  It is simply unacceptable in a democratic and free society to use tear gas, pepper spray and plastic bullets against peaceful protesters who are exercising their constitutionally protected rights to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.
	The fact that the Seattle police force continues to violate the basic civil and human rights of the hundreds of protesters still in custody is equally distasteful.  By leaving protesters on buses overnight and denying them access to food, water, medical attention and legal consul your police force has violated some of the most basic traditions upon which our legal system is based.
	I demand that you immediately release all of the protesters and drop all of the charges against them.  I also demand that you resign from your office to show your acknowledgment that your repressive treatment of non-violent protesters is an embarrassment to all Americans and the democratic principles on which this country was founded.

Sincerely,

name
address
phone number

	Ava had given me a small number of independent resources, whose own resources seemed to outline a vast network of activists.  It is a virtue of the global communication mainframe that allows such information to travel so widely and be so effective.  Two days after I received the above email Chief Norm Stamper resigned from the Seattle Police Department.