* Seattle Post-Intelligencer Natalie Sperry, 23, of Seattle, said she had never been in a public protest before the WTO. On Dec. 1, she joined 200 others sitting in Westlake Park, deep in the heart of Mayor Paul Schell's no-protest zone and a place where, under other circumstances, she might have been doing her Christmas shopping. The chanting crowd was surrounded by police in riot gear, arrested, hauled in city buses to Sand Point and eventually booked into jail. She says the experience changed her life. "This is my hometown and I was just ripped off the street," she said. "I learned that if you care about your society and your world that you don't belong on the streets. Only shoppers and people who support the multinational (companies) do. That's the message that I got." Now Sperry, a 1998 graduate of the University of Washington, is spending most of her time as a volunteer with the Direct Action Network. "I'm an activist now, and I was not (then)," she said. "They pushed me over the line. . . . They created activists because people are mad." *** http://gatt.org/ is not the first time that RTMark (http://rtmark.com) has used website imitation to render an entity more transparent. RTMark has performed the same service for George W. Bush (with GWBush.com, archived at http://rtmark.com/bush.html), Rudy Giuliani (http://yesrudy.com/), Shell Oil (http://rtmark.com/shell/), and others. RTMark's principal aim is to publicize corporate abuses of democratic processes. *** In February 1998, the Washington Post revealed that two large drugstore chains, CVS and Giant Foods Pharmacy, were selling prescription drug sales records to Elensys, a Woburn, Massachusetts, marketing and fulfillment. The companies said that they were only using Elensys to send out mailings that reminded customers to get their prescriptions refilled. But the Post story revealed that the profiles were also being used for targeted marketing -- and were being shared with other drug manufacturers. Giant Foods immediately said that they would curtail the practice, but CVS refused, at least at first, although it finally gave in to a torrent of consumer complaints. One month later, John Weld, Jr., a resident of South Dennis, Massachusetts, filed a class-action lawsuit against CVS, Elensys, and Glaxo-Wellcome, claiming that his private medical information had been breached and improperly traded. .... But no state or local law has criminalized the unauthorized release of medical records themselves. A secretary or a janitor who walks into the hospital's records room and faxes out the records might be violating the hospital's rules, but they wouldn't be committing a criminal act. "Most people think it's illegal to release medical records. They are unaware that no law exists," says Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of The Privacy Journal.	j a n u a r y . 1 8 . 2 0 0 0 (6:38 pm, san francisco) i'm beginning to feel persecuted by the department of parking and transportation. somehow, on four occasions already, the meterfolk managed to cruise by my car 2 minutes after the meter expired. this time they gave me a parking ticket while i was paying 3 previous parking tickets. sheesh mama. i work in a very corporate setting. the 'street' name is executive park boulevard for crips sake, a key is required to get into the women's restroom and you can get towed if you park in the reserved parking. it's down by 3com/candlestick park though and the quantity of sky there can fill up my lungs, even after four hours sitting in front of dreamweaver and WS_FTP. today i left work early to run some errands and i saw the sky had cleared from imminent drizzle to blue patchwork and white fluff. yes, i am a simpleton because i fall in love with clouds. j a n u a r y . 1 7 . 2 0 0 0 (11:57 pm, san francisco) | mlk day, all the way i'd rather not become another berkeley freak, another tourist attraction like the singing preacher or the naked guy. but it looks like i'm well on my way to becoming the "Crying Girl." two weeks ago i fell apart on channing way and sat down in the sidewalk to cry, people walking around me, chatting about the game, and two people stopping to ask if i needed a ride. last saturday walking back to my car i kept on howling and half-hiccuping through my tears. it was raining, not too heavily by east coast standards, but enough that everything just felt irrevocably wet. on haste, a girl opened the passenger side door of a pick-up truck to ask if i was OK and if i needed an umbrella. i said no, but half a block later she ran after me with two umbrellas - her mom had given her one, and "some random guy" had just given her one too, so therefore i had to take one because she definitely didn't need two. at this rate i should be getting low interest rates offered to me south of bancroft soon. [for some reason i keep on typing "just" instead of whatever word i want to be typing] if i had my druthers i wouldn't be doing so much public crying, but since i am, i'm glad that people don't just walk by. // martin luther king day hasn't felt like enough since i left high school. part of it is my problem with, as heather put it, the "great man" version of history. king was critical, sure, but to focus on his accomplishments solely to the exclusion of the contributions all the so-called ordinary folk can be something closer to hero worship than a time for national reflection. people have already started to try to make the day more than the "I Have A Dream" speech, though. and i guess, my other problem with mlk day is that it's just a day. it makes his dream feel like an anomaly and any attempt to bring it fruition a one-shot deal. i guess that's why they try for entire heritage months.	home now *10.31.99 *11.03.99 *11.13.99 *11.19.99 *11.25.99 - 12.3.99 *12.06.99 - 12.28.99 *12.29.99 - 01.08.00 and then weblog