/* Written 6:48 pm Sep 19, 1991 by an in cdp:an.stories */
/* ---------- "G0533 - APC Network" ---------- */
Slug: APC Network
AlterNet ID number: G0533
PeaceNet reference number: 675
Length: 1,100 words
Background: The Association of Progressive Communications is an electronic web that stretches around the world, connecting thousands of peace and environmental activists in 90 countries. They are using computers to break the mass media's stranglehold on information and to tackle some of the world's toughest problems. 11,000 members log on to networks in Brazil, Canada, England, the U.S.S.R., Australia, Nicaragua, Sweden, and the United States. Subscribers share information on everything from disposable diapers to nuclear waste. They chat privately with friends or argue politics in public with adversaries. They look for work, discuss movies, plan demonstrations, and write proposals--all by computer. They also access information services that make the APC a giant clearinghouse for alternative views and information. "Information is a commodity, and what we've done is provide access as cheaply and efficiently as possible," says Jillaine Smith, assistant director of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Communications (IGC), which represents the United States on APC.
Author: Peter White
Cost: A (100,000 plus): $85 C (30,000 to 49,999): $55
B (50,000 to 99,999): $70 D (less than 30,000): $40
Required ID: San Francisco Bay Guardian
PeaceNet Sweden Coordinator Cilla Lundstroem was sitting at a computer terminal one night in August when an urgent message flashed across her screen: Tanks were heading toward Leningrad.
The frightening news about the Soviet coup came from reporters at the Northwest News Service in the Soviet Union. Unable to reach the West from Moscow on clogged international phone lines, the Soviet reporters filed their stories over local lines to an cultural institute in Estonia that had a computer link with PeaceNet Sweden (PNS).
PNS forwarded those dispatches to GreenNet, its London-based partner, and to six other computer networks, including San Francisco- based PeaceNet.
"The reporters at Northwest News followed the tanks mile by mile, and they reported the reaction of the local police who refused to join the army,'' PNS's Lundstroem recalls in an interview in San Francisco. "Several people in the U.S. sent support messages to the people on the streets. Just to write a support message means a lot to people standing in front of tanks. It means a lot more than a comment from George Bush that reaches them the day after,'' she adds.
Lundstroem is one of a new breed of activists who are using computers to spark movements for social change around the world. It all started seven years ago in the corner of a basement with $200 and a plan to teach community organizers how to use computers. That project later became a fledgling computer network called PeaceNet. Since then, Peacenet has grown rapidly, spawning partner networks in seven other countries that together make up the Association of Progressive Communications.
APC is essentially an electronic web that stretches around the world, connecting thousands of peace and environmental activists in 90 countries. They are using computers to break the mass media's stranglehold on information and to tackle some of the world's toughest problems. Responding to world crises like the Soviet coup isn't the only reason APC's 11,000 members log on to networks in Brazil, Canada, England, the U.S.S.R., Australia, Nicaragua, Sweden, and the United States. (Three partner networks in Germany, Uruguay, and Ecuador will soon be up and running.) Subscribers share information on everything from disposable diapers to nuclear waste. They chat privately with friends or argue politics in public with adversaries. They look for work, discuss movies, plan demonstrations, and write proposals--all by computer. They also access one of 80 news and information services that make the APC a giant clearinghouse for alternative views and information. "Information is a commodity, and what we've done is provide access as cheaply and efficiently as possible,'' says Jillaine Smith, assistant director of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Communications (IGC), which represents the United States on APC.
This week, a California agency awarded a large grant to IGC to create a service that would condense news from the mountains of information on its many electronic bulletin boards. The grant, called "Californians in Dialogue for the Common Good,'' is designed to encourage participatory democracy throughout the state.
IGC's four networks--PeaceNet, EcoNet, ConflictNet, and HomeoNet-- have 6,500 U.S subscribers who pay $10 a month for one hour of off- peak computer time. The computer networks are doing for activists what the skill saw did for carpenters. They are empowering people in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
"The people I'm working with are activists. I'm helping them to do their job better,'' Smith says.
APC will leap to the big leagues of world politics next June in Rio de Janeiro, which will host the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development. The U.N has picked APC's Brazilian partner, AlterNex, to set up electronic mail services, data bases, and conferences for official delegates. Groups that lobby the U.N., like non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which for years have been slighted at U.N. conferences, will be able to tap into the same information network. The only thing NGO representatives will miss out on is the official luncheons.
Around the globe, other APC networks are working on issues of peace, social justice, and environmental protection. In Australia, the 1,200 members of the Pegasus network are working to hook up the affluent 18 percent of the electorate that votes Green, which would make the party more powerful. "The Greens already hold the balance of power in elections,'' says Ian Peter in an interview in Marin County. In Canada, the Web network has already transformed alternative politics, according to Kirk Roberts. "A forest activist working in British Columbia now has the same impact as a lobbyist in Ottawa,'' he says. "The strength and sophistication of the movement have increased dramatically.'' England's GreenNet Director Viv Kendon got a call just last week from Oxfam, the international relief agency. "They want GreenNet to set up telecommunications between their offices in New Delhi, Pakistan, and Vietnam,'' Kendon says.
Back in the United States, EcoNet is helping high school students monitor water quality in local rivers. One such experiment involved 50 students along the Rouge River in Michigan. Students took samples and entered data on computers, and then other students used the information to see how the water quality changed as the water moved downstream.
"Some incredible discussions went on between the students,'' recalled facilitator Jim Bull. "Rural students could see how what they put in the water affects low-income communities in urban areas. And inner-city students asked, `Hey, why are we getting all this crap?' ''
In all, APC organizers say tens of thousands of messages a day pass back and forth in this global village, and the number grows every day. But with different phone systems, software, and political structures in place around the world, there are also lots of glitches.
"It's like a Tower of Babel that keeps getting more complex,'' says PeaceNet's Howard Frederick.
During the Gulf War, volume on the IGC networks increased five-fold. The old brain, an AT/486 computer, bogged down under the load. It has since been replaced with a faster model that can handle 75 users at once.
As they expand, the computer networks are also entering questionable legal ground. "I spend about a third of my time working on policy questions, because this computer stuff is in a gray area of law,'' says ICG Director Geoff Sears.
"Is there a copyright difficulty? Is there too much advocacy to keep us a nonprofit? Are we liable for what one of our users says on our network? None of that is clear at all.''
What is clear, as GlasNet Executive Director Anatoly Vornov discovered, is that these computer networks are making big waves. During the Soviet coup, Vornov got a call from an unidentified bureaucrat who told him to turn off his machines and send him a list of the people who were speaking against the coup on the network.
Vornov refused. The rest, as they say, is history.
<it> For further information call USA (415) 442-0220.<>
# # #
Subject: NETWORK BACKGROUND ARTICLES #2
From hfrederick - Mon Jan 6, 1992
From: Howard Frederick <hfrederick>
To: hfrederick, linda_harasim@sfu.ca, newsdesk
Subject: Networking the Movement [IGC]
Nuclear Times Winter 1991-92
COMMUNICATIONS: Networking the Movement
by Nell Bernstein
In Nicaragua and Florida, New York and Mexico City - in locations all over the world - people interested in social change are turning to their personal computers as a means of reaching each other. And in a small office in San Francisco, the staff of the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) are working to ensure that their computers make this communication possible.
IGC is the parent organization for three computer networks - PeaceNet, EcoNet, and ConflictNet - of which PeaceNet is the broadest and most widely used (EcoNet focuses on environmental issues, and ConflictNet on conflict resolution). IGC is also the founding member of the International Association for Progressive Communications, which links similar networks in Canada, Sweden, Australia, Brazil, Nicaragua, England, Germany, and the Soviet Union.
People in many other countries can gain access to the networks through local, intermediary computers. Through these networks people virtually anywhere on the globe can talk about anything under the sun - publicly through open conferences, or privately through closed conferences or e-mail (electronic mail).
"Our original intention," says IGC project coordinator Jeff Lohrmann, "was to provide a coalescing tool between individuals and organizations interested in a broad range of subjects that deal with the health of the planet and of humanity. We wanted to create a place where people with a broad range of backgrounds could communicate with each other."
PeaceNet users may have a broad range of backgrounds, but they also have one important thing in common: access to a computer and a modem, and the technological know-how to use them. Jim Driscoll, national coordinator of Operation Real Security, says PeaceNet has been invaluable to his work as a peace activist, but notes that this high-tech form of communication has its limitations.
"You have to have a certain lack of computer phobia" to use the system, Driscoll notes. He adds that when he was working with SANE/FREEZE and later the American Peace Test to organize resistance to nuclear testing, power in the organization - which was run by consensus by local groups all over the country communicating via PeaceNet - "went to people who were comfortable with computers and would spend a lot of time logging on and writing long letters. That was the downside, just as in face-to-face groups there are problems with people who dominate the talking."
PeaceNet's organizers are aware of the limitation, but note that the network's influence is not limited to those who actually log on. PeaceNet subscribers, says IGC news director Howard Frederick, "are involved in a two-step flow of information. They receive and repackage it in a variety of ways. Each subscriber is an opinion former, if not by profession then by predisposition. There's a multiplier effect." Furthermore, Frederick points out, unlike centralized media such as television, "computers are highly distributive."
PeaceNet conferences include everything from debates about national security to squabbles over recent movies. A large proportion of the conferences focus on Latin America or the environment, and several are devoted to alternative news services such as the Rome-based Interpress or the San Francisco-based Pacific News Service. And 60 percent of all the activity that takes place on PeaceNet is e-mail - subscribers communicating privately with each other (and with subscribers to other linked networks) by sending and receiving messages that are stored in IGC's central computers.
The rest of the network's activity, says Frederick "depends upon what's happening." Most recently, the coup in the Soviet Union generated a large amount of network activity. Through its fledgling Moscow-based companion network, GlasNet, which serves 75 users, PeaceNet was able to trasmit live reports- "to put it plainly, it looks very much like a coup d'etat," wrote one Moscow user early on - that were blocked on traditional media.
The important of this kind of immediate international communication - and of linking up domestic activists - was made particularly clear by the war in the Persian Gulf. Frederick says that PeaceNet's "connect hours" - the measure of how much use the system is getting - went from 3,500 a month before the war, as activists all over the country looked for ways to circumvent what they perceived as a blackout on the part of the mainstream media. Many users sent messages to IGC saying that PeaceNet not only gave them information they couldn't find elsewhere, but also helped them realize they were not alone in their efforts or their concerns.
Activists who use the system say that the immediacy with which they can reach a wide audience has greatly enhanced their work. For example, when neo-Nazi skinheads this fall ransacked a Dresden neighborhood populated by foreigners, German activsts immediately posted news of the event, and Dresden newspapers were flooded with faxes from around the world deploring the action.
Debra Guzman, a San Francisco member of Amnesty International, has set up 37 conferences for Amnesty staff, members, and the interested public. "PeaceNet has been an incredible vehicle for Amnesty to move into the twentieth century," Guzman says. She has established working relationships with people all over the world through linked computer networks, relationships that simply would have been too expensive otherwise (with PeaceNet, sending a message across the world is no more expensive than sending it across the street - a few cents, usually). "I believe we save lives because of the speed with which we can now do work and get information on PeaceNet," Guzman says.
Andy Lang of the Christic Institute in Washington, D.C., which maintains a news conference on PeaceNet, believes that "a global electronic community for progressives is on the way, and PeaceNet is on the cutting edge of it." He points out that immediate communications is important for groups that are working, for example, to protest the arrest of human rights workers in El Salvador. With PeaceNet, he says, "information is translated very quickly into action."
Unless, as some users complain, you get mired in the mountains of information and never find your way out. No one would argue that PeaceNet does not provide enough information; the problem is that at times the system seems to provide too much. The endless lists of conferences, responses, and resources can be daunting, and can deter some users before they even get started.
"We are swimming in information," admits Frederick of the modern, high-tech world. "There's an information glut. People need to seize the tools that can help filter or direct them to the information they need." Experienced PeaceNet users will find system tools that allow them to do just this: limit the information they receive and tailor it to meet their own needs. The less-informed may find themselves flailing around lost in the system, wasting time and money as they learn things they never wanted to know if the first place.
IGC is currently developing a tool called "Ask Noam" - in honor of writer Noam Chomsky's legendary photographic memory - that will allow users to activate a computerized search for information on a given topic.
PeaceNet organizers and dedicated users are all aware that the system is only one tool among many, and none recommend that computer networks become a substitute for more traditional forms of communication - such as face-to-face discussion. The new technology is a means to an end, never an end in itself.
"The reason Ben Franklin got into printing was to communicate with fellow citizens about what was going on," notes Lohrmann. "People get into this technology because they believe it is an efficient way of organizing."
Nell Bernstein is editor of MediaFile, a San Francisco-based media review.
Subject: NETWORK BACKGROUND ARTICLES #3
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 92 15:46:41 PST
From: Howard Frederick <hfrederick>
/* Written 3:45 pm Jan 6, 1992 by hfrederick in cdp:media.issues */
/* ---------- "Boston Media Conf 11/9/91" ---------- */
The Technologies of Peace and War:
The Future of PeaceNet and Other Decentralized Technologies
by
Howard H. Frederick, Ph.D.
Institute for Global Communications
San Francisco, CA
Internet: hfrederick@igc.org
Appeared in:
BCS Update [Boston Computer Society], November 1991
I know that I'm speaking to one of the most sophisticated audiences in the world. Not only are you some of the most knowledgeable in computers and high technology, but by being here tonight many of you must certainly be among that honorable twenty percent of the U.S. population who did not go along with the government-instigated hysteria and media censorship of the Gulf war.
So I'm not going to give you an introduction into computer communications, nor am I even going to repeat the fine commentaries of the media critics and foreign policy analysts, many of them from Boston and Cambridge.
Instead, what I'd like to do is to put our struggle for peace and human rights into millennial perspective. I'm going to draw on the unknown history of communication in peace and war, placing PeaceNet in historical perspective. Then I'll give you a diagrammatic overview of our system, and finally I'll conclude with some comments on the challenges that we face collectively in the years ahead.
For thousands of years, people had little need for long- distance communication because they lived very close to one another. The medieval peasant's entire life was spent within a radius of no more twenty-five miles from the place of birth. Even at the beginning of our century, the average person still lived in the countryside and knew of the world only through travelers' tales.
Most communication moved at an agonizingly slow speeds. In the 1830s, a letter from Europe to India might take five to eight months by sailing ship around the Cape--in each direction! It took as long as two years to send a letter and receive a reply. But people came up with ingenious devices to overcome these vast distances. In 1825 the so-called "talking cannons" along the Erie Canal and the Hudson River set a record of speed of communication. By sequentially firing hundreds of cannons, they carried a simple predetermined message (that the first boat had entered the new waterway) 584 kilometers from Buffalo to New York City in the breakneck speed of eighty minutes!
This painfully slow communication had a dramatic affect on the course of war and peace.
If transatlantic communication had been faster, the War of 1812 need not have happened--and it would have ended sooner. The cause of that conflict was the British so-called "Order in Council" (1807) forcing all U.S. trade with Europe to pass through British ports. Communication at the time between Britain and America was measured in weeks and Congress declared war on Britain not knowing that Parliament had repealed the Order two days before. Even worse, the lack of communication lengthened the war and caused thousands of needless casualties. News of the peace treaty took weeks to arrive and the British attack on New Orleans went ahead as planned, even though the war had officially ended.
America's two most devastating wars were due in part to communications breakdowns.
Think back to the state of electronic technology in 1941. At the time, U.S. armed forces in Hawaii had just received those remarkable radar devices that could detect ships or airplanes at sea. Two Army privates with no radar training were about to go off duty at 7:00 A.M. on December 7, 1941 when they noticed a huge blip on the screen two hundred kilometers north of Oahu. Thinking that these radar images were a huge flight of enemy planes, they tried to contact headquarters by radio. But no one answered and minutes later they finally got through by ordinary telephone. The commanding officer, thinking the blip was a group of American bombers arriving from the mainland, told them "not to worry about it." The rest is history.
It can be said that even the Vietnam War started due to a communications breakdown. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident? On August 2, 1964, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was cruising a zigzag course off the coast of North Vietnam. Aboard the Maddox was the most modern communications and electronics available. That evening violent thunderstorms rocked the Gulf of Tonkin and the Maddox's equipment was functioning erratically. For the second time in two days, the captain of the Maddox received messages that he interpreted to be North Vietnamese ships on the attack. For the second time he called in American jets and unloaded decoys in all directions to detonate incoming torpedoes. The ship's sonars detected twenty-two incoming torpedoes, none of which struck its target.
None of the sailors saw any Vietnamese ships. Neither had the fighter pilots. Subsequent research has indicated with almost total certainty that the second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened.
Yet President Johnson, seeking a pretext, went on television to say "Repeated acts of violence . . . must be met . . . with positive reply." He immediately went to Congress to report that U.S. destroyers had again been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson seized upon a fuzzy set of circumstances to fulfill a contingency plan. Under pressure from the President, on August 10, 1964 Congress passed the infamous "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" giving the President power to commit American forces in Vietnam without Congressional approval, thanks to a breakdown in communications technology.
I needn't repeat them but I am sure you are all familiar with the powerful media aspects of the recent Gulf War, particular the deliberate news management by the Pentagon, the live pictures of the Scud attacks on Jerusalem, the Nintendo- style pictures of Cruise missiles passing slowly down streets and directly into the air vents of "command centers" filled with hundreds of innocent civilians.
Today, of course, the media landscape has been totally transformed. Now we are now able to watch war live from the front. But something else has happened too, something that can have a impressive effect on the course of war and peace.
All the channels we have spoken about to this point--from radar and military communications to satellites and television news--are highly centralized and rest in the hands of the mili tary, the wealthy and the governing elite.
But today there has arisen a worldwide metanetwork of highly decentralized technologies--computer networks, fax machines, amateur radio, packet data satellites, VCRs, video cameras and the like. For the first time in history the forces of peace have the communication tools previously reserved for the military, government and transnational corporation. Advocacy groups and NGOs such as Amnesty International, the rainforest protection movement and the Middle East peace movement are now beginning to have an impact on the course of peace and war.
The first large-scale impact of these decentralizing technologies on international politics happened less than two years ago. When the Chinese government massacred its citizens near Tianamen Square on June 4, 1989, Chinese students transmitted the most detailed, vivid reports instantly by fax, telephone and computer networks to activists throughout the world. They organized protests meetings, fundraising, speaking tours and political appeals. Their impact was so immense and immediate that the Chinese government tried to cut telephone links to the exterior and started to monitor the Usenet computer conferences where much of this was taking place.
Another historical example is the Gulf War, where computer networks such as PeaceNet exploded with activity. While mainstream channels of communication were blocked by Pentagon censorship, PeaceNet was carrying accurate reports of the effects of the Gulf War on the Third World, Israel and the Arab countries and the worldwide anti-war movement. For a movement caught off- guard, amazingly smooth coordination took place rapidly across the country and the world. Competing groups agreed on common platforms, set synchronized action dates, and planned large-scale events across vast distances. Computerists seized the technology and made it work. PeaceNet truly proved itself in the cauldron of struggle.
Let me describe our network in a bit more detail.
At the hub of this system is the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Communications (IGC), home of PeaceNet, the world's only computer communications system dedicated to helping the peace and human rights communities to cooperate more effectively and efficiently.
PeaceNet and its sister network EcoNet are connected to partner networks in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Nicaragua, Soviet Union, Sweden, United Kingdom, and to affiliated networks in Bolivia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. PeaceNet is linked by electronic "gateways" to sixty other commercial and noncommercial systems, including the worldwide Internet research network. So there is virtually no computer user in the world who cannot gain access PeaceNet.
PeaceNet and its partner networks have built a truly global network dedicated to the free and balanced flow of information. The draft APC Constitution mandates its partners to serve people working toward "peace, the prevention of warfare, elimination of militarism, protection of the environment, furtherance of human rights and the rights of peoples, achievement of social and economic justice, elimination of poverty, promotion of sustainable and equitable development, advancement of participatory democracy, and nonviolent conflict resolution."
Simply put, electronic mail (or "email") connects two correspondents through a computer and a modem to a "host" computer. One user, let's say a peace researcher in Finland, uses her computer to dial into a local data network (analogous to the telephone network but for data traffic instead of voice). She either types in a message or "uploads" a prepared text, which is then sent to the PeaceNet host computer in California. Later, her correspondent, a university peace studies professor in Hawaii, connects in the same way to the host and "downloads" the message. This miraculous feat, near instantaneous communication across half the globe, costs each user only the price of a local phone call plus a small transmission charge.
Unlike systems used by the large commercial services, the APC Networks are highly decentralized and preserve local autonomy. One microcomputer serves a limited geographical region and is in turn connected with other "nodes." The local node collects the international mail, bundles and compresses it, then sends it to the appropriate foreign messaging system for distribution using a special high-speed connection.
In addition to email, the APC Networks also have more than six hundred electronic "conferences," basically a collective mailbox open to all users, or a specific group of users. It is here that people can publicize events, prepare joint proposals, disseminate vital information and find the latest data on everything from the arms race to Zimbabwe. In these conferences PeaceNet carries a number of important alternative news sources, including Inter Press Service (the Third World's largest news agency), Environmental News Service, Amnesty International alerts, Greenpeace News, and the United Nations news service.
What do people actually do online with their computers and modems? Here are a few real-life examples taken from actual online messages:
"Back in the olden days, we had to ride 24 hours on the bus every 2-3 months to San Antonio, where another Mujer a Mujer member lives, to make marathon phone calls. Now we're so excited about the power & possibilities of electronic communication." Elaine Burns, Mujer a Mujer, Mexico City
"We're a community based health project located in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Peacenet has enabled us to maintain contact with our people there even when there was not any reliable mail service." Cynthia Kruger, Bocay, Nicaragua
"PeaceNet helps us link elementary and secondary schools educator so kids can have the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the health and welfare of the planet." Peter Copen, Yorktown Heights, NY:
"The Gulf war proved that PeaceNet is invaluable in gathering news deliberately filtered out by the establishment press." Larry Bensky, National Affairs Correspondent, Pacifica Radio
"I use my solar-powered laptop out here in the Australian bush to publish "THE BUSH TELEGRAPH." The network has allowed me to inform myself to a degree which would be impossible through the establishment media." Mike Holland, New South Wales, Australia
"We are the Center for Information, Documentation and Research Support of the Jesuit-run Central American University of El Salvador (UCA). Our weekly bulletin of news analysis, Proceso, is sent to organizations and individuals on PeaceNet." Christina Courtright, San Salvador, El Salvador
Let me conclude with some remarks about the challenges we face in the nineties. A handful of immense corporations dominate the world's mass media. If present trends continue, by the turn of the century, as former University of California journalism dean Ben Bagdikian has predicted, "five to ten corporate giants will control most of the world's important newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast stations, movies, recordings and videocassettes." These "lords of the global village" exert a homogenizing influence over ideas, culture and commerce.
We need what Dean George Gerbner of the Annenberg School of Communication has termed a Cultural Environmental Movement. Just as Earth's physical environment has its moving plates and colliding continents, Earth's cultural environment is dynamically active, with ideas moving about, crashing into one another and causing social earthquakes and revolutionary eruptions. And just as the physical environment is threatened with toxic wastes and degradation, so too the cultural environment is threatened by monopolistic control, market-driven commercialism, indeed even by toxics such as the jingoistic militarism we have seen in our own society.
We need a movement to protect the cultural environmental just as we need to protect the physical environment. The media lords of the global village cultivate behaviors that drug and kill thousands every day. They portray our lives as stereotypes, marginalizing, dehumanizing and stigmatizing us. They inundate us with a cult of media violence that desensitizes, intimidates and terrorizes us and, when they call us up, we willingly incinerate, pulverize and devastate other peoples. Corporate hucksterism often blinds us to the ruination of our environment. Our public schools, criminal justice system and arts are crumbling as make-believe media politics masquerade as democracy. We wage war on everything but injustice in our midst and unfolding economic conditions that can only be described as the emergence of an American Third World.
It is the decentralizing media that provide us with the most hope--those channels of communication that arise from and reach into grassroots, that provide truly alternative information from the monopolies of knowledge, those that empower and enfranchise the advocates of peace and the protectors of the environment, those that are low-cost and reliable, those that help people to cooperate on a global scale. This is the vision of PeaceNet and its partner networks and I'm grateful that by being here tonight you are supporting PeaceNet, you too are contributing to making this vision a reality.
For more information in the United States, you can contact:
PeaceNet, 18 De Boom Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
