Thought this was pretty cool. Maybe some of you from the Bay area can shed a little more light...
By Brad Kava
Republished from San José Mercury News
Daniel Roberts won't stop making pirate radio broadcasts. The FCC won't stop telling him to stop. This has been going on since Roberts, 25, was a teenager growing up in Los Gatos.
Since then his Pirate Cat Radio (87.9 FM) — now out of San Francisco — has developed a reputation as one of the most sophisticated pirate broadcasts in the country. He even has a novel idea as to why the FCC might be letting him get away with it: the war on terror.
As he tells it, the FCC would send him a warning and he would send back a quote from the agency’s Web page, which says that radio stations can operate without a license in times of national emergency or war. He argues that the current war on terrorism falls under that definition.
“In the past 10 years we had the ‘war on drugs’ and now we have the war on terrorism,” he says. “I’m good to go. Pirate Cat can broadcast for another 40 years.”
Whether that’s true is anybody’s guess — Clyde Ensslin, an FCC spokesman, declined to comment on its pending investigation of Roberts.
But whatever the agency’s reasons, it hasn’t enforced its threats against Roberts’ station, which has little to do with wartime programming.
The penalties for unlicensed broadcasting include fines of up to $100,000 and up to a year in jail for a first offense. Roberts says he…
Read the rest here
By Brad Kava
Republished from San José Mercury News
Daniel Roberts won't stop making pirate radio broadcasts. The FCC won't stop telling him to stop. This has been going on since Roberts, 25, was a teenager growing up in Los Gatos.
Since then his Pirate Cat Radio (87.9 FM) — now out of San Francisco — has developed a reputation as one of the most sophisticated pirate broadcasts in the country. He even has a novel idea as to why the FCC might be letting him get away with it: the war on terror.
As he tells it, the FCC would send him a warning and he would send back a quote from the agency’s Web page, which says that radio stations can operate without a license in times of national emergency or war. He argues that the current war on terrorism falls under that definition.
“In the past 10 years we had the ‘war on drugs’ and now we have the war on terrorism,” he says. “I’m good to go. Pirate Cat can broadcast for another 40 years.”
Whether that’s true is anybody’s guess — Clyde Ensslin, an FCC spokesman, declined to comment on its pending investigation of Roberts.
But whatever the agency’s reasons, it hasn’t enforced its threats against Roberts’ station, which has little to do with wartime programming.
The penalties for unlicensed broadcasting include fines of up to $100,000 and up to a year in jail for a first offense. Roberts says he…
Read the rest here