Invasion of the Gadflies in Cyberspace

From the cramped, book-lined dining room of his modest bungalow, Rene Amy wages war against the Pasadena Unified School District via modem.

The 37-year-old father of two school-age children badgers bureaucrats and catalogs mini-scandals on his World Wide Web site, a quirky digital newsletter where investigative reporting meets Mad magazine.

“Audit the PU$D,” Amy demands on the first page. A few clicks away, he documents $4,000 worth of bar tabs run up by district employees and details how school employees accessed Internet porn sites. Posted nearby is the transcript of a routine by the British comedy troupe Monty Python.

Amy’s activism follows a hallowed American tradition--that of the lone gadfly who shows up at public meetings to rail at elected leaders over everything from obscure procedural violations to wasteful spending, trying to rouse a complacent public. Usually, their arguments are ignored and they go home frustrated.

But Amy is a gadfly with gigabytes, and like other community activists who have gone online, his perch on the information superhighway has given him new reach. While once their rants and pleas were heard only by the unfortunates whose jobs require they sit through interminable city council or school board meetings, this new Gadfly Nation can communicate directly with anyone in town with a computer and modem as well as network with like-minded activists across the country.

Amy and others like him who used to be dismissed as ineffective nuisances are now on the “forefront of a revolution,” said Terry Francke, director of the California First Amendment Coalition, which often gives legal advice to local activists. “If [activists] use [the Internet] as an extension of their efforts to get attention to the causes they wage, then it can be very powerful.”

Many of these fledgling revolutionaries remain voices in the wilderness, their crusades unnoticed in cyberspace as they were in the city council chambers. But in cities from Pasadena to Stamford, Conn., Internet activism is slowly making an impact--sometimes small, sometimes dramatic--on local politics.

That impact comes from the Internet’s unique ability to spread information, said the creator of a Web site dedicated to stopping the conversion of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County into a commercial airport.

“It used to be in politics that the politicians could keep a lot of things to themselves. Information is power, and by sitting on a lot of things they achieved their objectives more easily,” said Len Kranser, a retired businessman who lives in Dana Point. “We’re just having a much more informed group of community activists who have access to hundreds of documents.”

The El Toro Web site displays newspaper articles, government reports and studies on airports. When Kranser finds a study on the effects of airport noise on children, he posts a synopsis on the site, where it is picked up by dozens of other activists from Kentucky to Australia who are fighting local airport development. What would have taken hours of stamp-licking and hundreds of dollars in distribution costs a decade ago now takes Kranser less than 30 minutes of free keystrokes.

Benjamin Barber, a professor of politics at Rutgers University who studies online political discourse, cautions that the Internet can be a blessing and a curse in local politics.

“It has both enhanced some of the virtues of local politics--instant communication, ongoing interaction, quick response time and strength of community,” said Barber, author of the best-selling book “Jihad vs. McWorld.”

“The problem is that it also enhances the vices of local politics--gossip, rumors, lies, anonymous slurs,” Barber said.

Dubious Tactics Employed by Some

Some sites, like Amy’s, mostly quote media accounts and display city documents. But others make liberal use of unnamed sources and unsubstantiated allegations. One site about the San Bernardino County city of Colton includes “public comments” from anonymous e-mailers speculating about city affairs. That online gadfly compares himself to Matt Drudge, whose much-criticized Internet gossip column sparked the media stampede over the president’s alleged affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Greg Hiscott, who runs a Web site in Glendale that includes discussions of political issues, says he must constantly monitor the online debates. “I have had to edit some of that stuff because it sometimes is inflammatory or without basis,” he said.

That’s a hazard of the medium, experts say.

“Many people find that they talk more casually and say things in the e-mail world that they wouldn’t think of writing in, for example, an interoffice memo,” said Michael C. Lasky, a New York attorney specializing in new media.

Named after the biting insects that pester horses--and occasionally get swatted by horses’ tails--gadflies can be major irritants for public officials and bureaucrats.

In Pasadena, school officials complain that Amy burns up their time with his constant demands for documents, while others say Amy’s focus on small wrongdoings distracts from discussion of larger and more serious issues.

“He is a bully. His bullying techniques are the fax machine, the U.S. mail, the television and print media and the Internet,” school district spokeswoman Betsy Richman said. “He desperately seeks attention.”

Spurred Into Activism

Amy is a natural-born gadfly--with what he calls an “investigative nature” and a pit bull’s tendency to never let go.

An independent contractor who makes house repairs, Amy got involved in the public schools in 1992 when he volunteered to do maintenance work on his children’s elementary school. He said he became frustrated with the glacial pace of school district bureaucracy that left exposed lightbulbs and unsafe playground equipment within arm’s reach of students.

Eventually, he began questioning how the district spent state money for his children’s gifted programs. He griped that the money was spent on administration rather than teaching, and when officials ignored his complaints, he went to the local press.

His Web site debuted a few months later, after he had driven through town in a U-Haul truck with a placard reading “Audit the PUSD!” It began as one page designed by his wife Laraine, a software engineer, but has grown into a multipage site with links to other Web resources that have aided Amy in his crusade--such as sites that help with auditing and fraud investigation. It also boasts more idiosyncratic features, like a version of the children’s song “Little Bunny Foo-Foo,” which Amy and his kids composed at the dinner table to lampoon the district.

As the site grew, Amy studied Web design manuals, snatched graphics from other sites he encountered while surfing the Net and bought a new $2,000 Compaq PC and a scanner to assist his aging PowerMac. Although he says he spends 15-20 hours a week on his crusade, the most laborious part is doing research at district headquarters.

Amy said his site has received about 3,000 hits from computer users across the country, a tiny number by Internet standards, but a lot of potential contacts and exposure for a small-time activist on a tight budget. One of the visitors was Standard and Poor’s, which recently checked out Amy’s site before giving the district its top bond rating.

And by one measure, Amy’s online foray has worked. His cause attracted attention in area newspapers and the local evening news, and now a group of about 20 people who live within the school district boundaries meet irregularly to discuss the issues he voices.

Pasadena school officials say that Amy represents no one but himself, pointing to a lack of a major movement to arise from his campaign.

Nonetheless, said the Rev. George Van Alstine, a school board member, “some of the questions that he’s raised have been questions that have been important for us to address. He just doesn’t seem to know when to stop.”

“Every public body has some folks who make it their job to keep them uncomfortable, and that’s not a bad part of democracy,” Van Alstine said.

Repercussions Can Surface

Sometimes, as those gadflies ratchet up municipal discomfort by winning a wider audience online, City Hall strikes back.

In Stamford, Conn., a school district has gone to court to stop the parents of a boy beaten outside a high school from posting the legal depositions of administrators online. The parents had sued the district over the attack.

In Colton, the Rev. Steve Anderson railed at the City Council for years and even led successful recalls of council members. But he said it wasn’t until he went online last May that there were repercussions--a city trash contractor sued Anderson for defamation.

The claim was ultimately dismissed by a judge, but not before Anderson’s congregation dwindled from 200 to 30 members as his reputation was battered and he flirted with financial ruin. “The whole idea was to shut me up,” he said.

But Anderson, who is counter-suing, says he has no regrets about taking his fight to the Internet.

“I was getting censored like crazy at the council meetings. They’d just shut me up and sit me down with the time limit,” said Anderson, referring to the three-minute limit on public comments at Colton council meetings. After going online, “they took me more seriously.”

Anderson views himself as an American throwback. “That’s what I am, a town hall crier,” he said.

It’s not just town hall criers who are changing the way democracy is practiced.

Marketing Information

In Glendale, the network maintained by Greg Hiscott--which includes council agendas and a feature allowing Glendale High School alumni to find their classmates via the Internet--is so popular that he sells advertising on the site and has opened a similar one for Pasadena.

Barber, the Rutgers professor, points out that it is mainly affluent residents or regions that take advantage of online democracy. “Politics is already skewed toward the educated and the active,” Barber said. “[The Internet] skews politics even more in that direction.”

So it’s not surprising that a glimpse of the future can be found in the affluent city of Colorado Springs, Colo. In 1984, retired Army Col. Dave Hughes began pestering city leaders by publicizing a proposed ordinance that would bar at-home businesses. He posted the measure on a bulletin board he set up on a local computer network. Hundreds of people who had never attended a city council meeting flocked to the council in protest and the measure was altered.

Fourteen years later, the Internet is such a part of Colorado Springs’ political process that one group of local activists is trying to get raw government data downloaded onto its Web site so residents can engage in their own planning analysis.

“Since all politics is local, I feel very strongly that this is where our future society has to build up from,” said Hughes, 70. “From the community.”

Times correspondent Richard Winton contributed to this story.

Where to Look on the Web

Here are the Web addresses for the sites mentioned:

* Rene Amy

https://home.earthlink.net/~auditpusd

* El Toro Airport Info Site

https://www.eltoroairport.org

* Steve Anderson, Colton

https://www.steve4u.com

* Glendale Online

https://www.Glendale-Online.com