Anticipating hordes of black-masked, Starbucks-smashing anarchists, the Pittsburgh police and the Secret Service coordinated nearly 4,000 law enforcement officers, outfitting them with the latest in riot-dispersal technology. Crowds marching on the summit were met with pepper spray, stun grenades, and—for the first time on US soil—acoustic cannons that blast painful sounds as far as 1,000 feet. But the protesters had their own crowd-control methods, and that’s what had brought the state troopers to the CareFree Inn.

What they found when they broke down the door were a couple of middle-aged housemates from Queens, New York. Elliott Madison sat at a desk with a laptop and a cell phone. A police scanner lay nearby. Michael Wallschlaeger was at the minifridge grabbing some hummus when the police rushed in. According to the criminal complaint filed against them, the two men had been “communicating with various protestors, and protest groups…[via] internet based communications, more commonly known as ‘Twitter’. The observed ‘Twitter’ communications were noted to be relevant to the direction of the movement of the Protestors…in order to avoid apprehension…”

Madison and Wallschlaeger were part of Tin Can Comms Collective, a “collection of communication rebels” made up of several individuals in various locations across Pittsburgh. Madison’s job was to verify information being sent in and then relay that to legal observers, street medics, and other organizers who could in turn tweet the information to the masses in the streets.

The raid occurred just as the protests were starting, but even as Madison and Wallschlaeger were arrested, the information flowed from the other tweeters without a blip. “A comms facility was raided, but we are still fully operational please continue to submit reports” stated one subsequent tweet.

The real-time updates were available to anyone who followed the feed, allowing protesters to see the theater of operations and add information to the picture. It was as if the demonstrators had gotten their own helicopter. Tin Can Comms sent out messages such as “SWAT teams rolling down 5th Ave towards Schenley” and “40 cops, w/ bus, headed towards friendship park.” The police knew they were being outflanked, but could do little against a decentralized foe: “SCANNER JUST SAID: BE ADVISED WE’RE BEING MONITORED BY ANARCHISTS THROUGH SCANNER,” noted one Tin Can tweet.

Madison and Wallschlaeger were charged with “criminal use of a communication facility,” “possessing instruments of crime,” and “hindering apprehension”—two felony counts and one misdemeanor.

With his long ponytail and goatee, Madison looks younger than his 42 years. A full-time social worker and self-proclaimed anarchist, he has long played support roles in protest movements, most often as a legal observer or a communications coordinator. He has no criminal record, but nevertheless had to post $30,000 in bail. Wallschlaeger, a 46-year-old host of a radio show called “This Week in Radical History,” had to post $5,000.

Madison calls the arrest an attempt to “stifle dissent” and says his actions were “perfectly legal.” His lawyer, Martin Stolar, calls them “absolutely protected speech.” Madison also points out the irony that last June the State Department asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance so as not to interrupt Iranian protesters tweeting from the barricades.

Tehran and Pittsburgh were not the first time social networking and mass texts were used to support a large-scale protest: At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, thousands of protesters were organized by a mass-messaging program called TXTmob (pdf). This proved the new tools’ usefulness to both activists and police, and they adjusted their strategies accordingly. TXTmob is even credited as one of the programs that inspired Twitter’s inventors.

In Pittsburgh, the protesters’ Twitter stream continued through the end of the G20 summit, with noticeable results. By the time the tear gas cleared, only around 190 arrests had been made, far fewer than at previous protests in Seattle and New York. The media soon forgot about the story—but for the two arrestees, an ordeal that Madison describes as “Kafkaesque” was only beginning.

At around six in the morning a week after Madison and Wallschlaeger posted bail, a dozen NYPD officers and FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) broke down the front and back doors of Madison’s home in Queens. Guns drawn, they smashed in bedroom doors, and Madison, Wallschlaeger, their housemates, and a guest were left handcuffed on a couch. With helicopters circling overhead, agents searched the house for 16 hours. “I asked to see the search warrant,” says Madison, “and they basically said, ‘Fuck you, you’ll see it when we give it to you.’”

Court records show the FBI seized hundreds of items, including computers, hard drives, cameras, a World War I-era gas mask, “anarchy books,” even an antique needlepoint of Lenin made by Madison’s wife’s grandmother. Several issues of Steampunk Magazine, where Madison writes under the pen name Professor Calamity, were also seized, as was a guide on poisons (which he says he uses in the writing of mystery novels), a Mao Tse-tung refrigerator magnet, and several Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. A poster in the living room of anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was left alone; “I guess they didn’t know who he was,” says Madison. At one point a hazmat team in full protective gear was brought in to investigate a jar of kombucha tea fermenting in the basement. Madison claims a JTTF agent shook his head and said, “You guys are just a bunch of hippies!”

The raid seemed to have an aimless quality. Madison was handed a ticket for a packet of fireworks, and an agent who put his hand into a suspected bag of marijuana discovered, painfully, that it was dried stinging nettles, used in homeopathy. “It was almost as if they thought, ‘If we take enough stuff, we’ll find something to charge them with,’” Madison says. When he was finally shown the cover sheet to the search warrant, it provided for the seizure of any items “designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws.”

The federal anti-riot statute—18 USC §2101—makes it a felony to engage in interstate travel to “organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot.” The statute is almost never invoked, but was used to indict the Chicago 7 for their organizing activities during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That case was ultimately appealed and thrown out on other grounds, so the constitutionality of the anti-riot statute has never been challenged in the Supreme Court. Critics have long contended that it is vague, overbroad, and designed to suppress protest activity and free expression. Applied in the current context, “it starts to criminalize dissent, to conflate terrorism with demonstrations, and that’s a very, very dangerous notion,” says lawyer Stolar. “Essentially it’s prosecution for a thought crime.”

The fallout from the G20 protests has gotten curiouser and curiouser. In an unexpected move, the Pittsburgh charges against Madison and Wallschlaeger were summarily dismissed. A spokesman for the Allegheny County district attorney said that the defendants’ actions “may have been related to more expansive activities” and “that until further investigative activities by law enforcement agencies can be completed, it would be more prudent to have the current charges withdrawn.” Whatever the JTTF was up to, in other words, would remain secret, along with the sealed warrant that the Pennsylvania state troopers had used.

At around the same time, during an October hearing on the Queens raid, a prosecutor revealed that a federal grand jury had been convened to investigate protest activities. The affidavits containing the allegations that convinced a judge to approve the search of Madison’s house also remain sealed.

Federal and grand juries are conducted in utter secrecy and have enormous power. The old joke is that they can “indict a ham sandwich,” but if they turn up nothing, they can disappear with no public disclosure. Stolar doesn’t know of anyone who has been summoned, but given the course of events, “I would say they’re looking to go after what they consider to be hardcore demonstrators,” he says. “I have very little faith in government anyway,” says Madison, “but this is something I would have expected more under the Bush regime.” A spokesman for the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment on the investigation.

Madison and his housemates are trying to get on with their lives, not knowing when, or if, the other shoe will drop. “Nothing could ever happen and we’ll never know why,” says Madison, sitting in the living room of his Queens home, the broken lock on the front door still unrepaired. “We’re anarchists,” he adds, “but that’s not illegal, and it’s actually a good thing. We’re not ashamed of it. Part of the thing with the government is to make you feel not only afraid but also ashamed. That’s just not going to work with me.”

Students are not alone in their dissatisfaction. Polls show residents see California headed the wrong way with a gaping budget shortfall, legislative gridlock, slashed social services and double-digit joblessness.

Marchers may be the vanguard of a debate about whether California should temper its aspirations or pay more to maintain universities and other “Golden State” hallmarks.

“This is unprecedented, unparalleled, you know. This is ridiculous,” said Jesse Cheng, a student nonvoting member of the university governing board. “For the students at the (University of California) now, this is our political moment… We can stand up and improve our system and get our state out of these incredibly difficult times.”

Marches are planned in Berkeley, the 1960s protest hub, Los Angeles, Sacramento and campuses of state universities inside and outside the University of California system.

Racist acts, including a swastika and anti-gay graffiti has raised temperatures on campuses. Fee hikes of more than 30 percent to over $10,000 per year will make the university more costly than rivals in other states.

Students see that closing doors to less affluent, minority students — privatizing the university — and building on the effects of a 1996 state initiative which banned affirmative action at state institutions.

California did not even charge an Education Fee — the equivalent of tuition — in the 1960s, when state investment built campuses into national-level institutions, roads to link the state and canals that made the desert bloom with food.

“Beyond the fact that there isn’t money, there is a sense that education has become a private good,” University of California spokesman Pete King said.

The state has cut support and so university fees have risen, he said. Fee hikes will take university costs above the four state schools it compares itself with, including schools in Virginia and Michigan, the university said.

For Hoover Institution scholar Bill Whalen, who used to work for moderate Republican Governor Pete Wilson, the university’s issues reflect an overreaching by the state on services and promises — without the financial power to do so.

“We are at a time where we can’t afford this path of spending, we just can’t keep up with it. It’s like the Soviets trying to compete in the arms race,” he said, arguing that the university and state needed to clarify their missions.

The university also gets plenty of criticism. Students say administrators have been slow to address racism on campus and are forcing university diversity to plummet with higher fees.

A new campus that opened in the agricultural Central Valley in Merced in 2005. It was a long-planned expansion to increase services where they were needed most for some, and a bad move at the wrong time to others.

“There is nothing else to call that but a hair-brained scheme,” said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education.

Other state universities feel the pinch: rival University of Illinois is weighing tuition hikes of up to 20 percent for incoming freshmen, said Stanley Ikenberry, interim president of university’s campus at Urbana-Champaign, in a newspaper interview this week.

But Callan sees California in a unique position. “There is a kind of hubris on the part of the state and the university” embarking on costly missions when times are worst, he said.

UC Berkeley student and organizer Ricardo Gomez sees the state moving away from conservative economic policies and toward goals like free higher public education.

“These crises are going to offer the electorate and people of California an opportunity to once again to stand up for what we believe in,” he said. He plans to march on Thursday.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Stern in Chicago) (Reporting by Peter Henderson)

The appointed hour — Friday, from 12 noon to 1 p.m. PST — came and went and AT&T’s (T) wireless had not been brought to its knees, despite the best efforts of thousands of Apple (AAPL) iPhone users.

“As far as I can tell, there’s been no impact at all,” wrote Dan Lyons in The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs at 12:19 p.m. “My iPhone is working just the same as ever. ”

It was Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, who on Monday had encouraged iPhone owners to overwhelm AT&T’s network by turning on a data-intensive app and running it for an hour. Operation Chokehold, as he dubbed it, was intended as a protest against AT&T’s threatened imposition of data usage fees.

By Wednesday, after the FCC’s chief of homeland security issued a stern warning, Lyons began to have second thoughts. But by then the protest had taken on a life of its own. See here.

Although there were scattered reports of slowdowns Friday on Operation Chokehold’s official Facebook page, AT&T’s 3G network seemed to be holding up just fine.

In Brooklyn, where we were monitoring the network’s performance, upload and download speeds actually increased during the hour. See the chart below the fold.

CNN Money

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

To Read more about Operation Chokehold visit Here.

Demonstrators rushed Covel Commons around 11:10 a.m. today in an effort to protest undergraduate fee increases being voted on this week by the UC Board of Regents.

After hours of chanting outside Covel, protesters pushed against the barricades that prevented access to the building and broke through them, which led to a flood of protesters stampeding to get inside.

“The UC Regents don’t care. … They only care about their progress, basically themselves,” said Miles Goodloe, a third-year political science student who said he was Tasered twice by police. “And I had to get Tasered to understand that.”

As of approximately 1 p.m., UCPD spokeswoman Nancy Greenstein said she did not believe Taser guns had been used.

The UC Board of Regents has been meeting since Tuesday to discuss the 32 percent fee increase, which was passed by the board’s Committee on Finance earlier today. Students from a variety of campus organizations came to Covel this morning to voice their disapproval of the proposed fee hikes.

“It’s ridiculous how I have to protect my education,” Goodloe said.

After demonstrators attempted to break through the barricades, university police forced students back with the threat of clubs and Taser guns.

Protesters made a second attempt to get past the police, which only led to expanded barricades. Police armed with clubs and stun guns then formed a line from the side of Delta Terrace to Covel Commons, pushing demonstrators away from Covel.

UCPD declared the protest as unlawful activity after “bottles, food and rocks were thrown at police officers,” said UCPD Capt. John Adams.

“This assembly is now in violation of the law,” Adams said to the crowd. “On the condition of unlawful assembly, I command that you disperse. All persons who do not leave the Covel Commons courtyard within the next five minutes may be arrested.”

Most protesters then left the area, although some came back later to demonstrate their solidarity.

“We want the public to know we’re invested in this,” said Jan Victor Andasan, campus organization director for the USAC EVP office and a second-year English student. “We’re still here standing together and … we want to know where the money goes.”

Read More: Daily Bruin

The students erected a Soviet gulag on the quad of the University to vividly display the ultimate “solution” to dissidence in socialist societies sparking campus intrigue, discussion, and debate. Although an officer initially arrived on the scene and found everything was peaceful, undercover video reveals smarmy Washington University administrators continuing to press and make excuses to shut the fake-Gulag down.It took the bureaucracy hours to find an obscure policy to use against the students.

The man in the video cited the new “Schools Art Installation Policy” as the reason for removing the protest. However it seems that the policy was so new that he couldn’t remember anything about it.

Administrator: “What it is…there’s a new policy on campus…and they did not inform you of it. There’s a process that you need to go through…yeah…

Student: “Where was this policy?”

Administrator: It’s on the… that’s the problem…that’s the problem and may be the reason you didn’t get it… It’s called the art installation policy

The police couldn’t legally do anything about it which is why she left. So the administrator had to come up with something to CYA, before the bureaucracy caught wind of it and he had to really answer to somebody.

I looked up the St. Louis Washington University’s Political Art Installation Policy and it has nothing to do with what is allowed on campus. In fact the only thing the policy does, is require a formal proposal to be filled out IF you are requesting funding for the installation.

Since the students used private funds to pay for the artwork then this policy should have no matter over them.

Read it for yourself: Washington University, St. Louis