Farhad Manjoo

Raves have been a cultural phenomenon for more than a decade. The high-energy dance parties, both organized and improvised, have taken place in countless places — clubs, warehouses, rooftops, ranches — across the country without incident. Yet raves clearly upset something in rural Utah. Utah County Sheriff James Tracy says he broke up the rave to stop rampant drug use, sexual abuse and dangerous health conditions. But in the month since the raid, details have emerged in interviews with attendees, in press reports and in court that vindicate the ravers and paint a disturbing picture of excessive police force.

In August, rave organizer Brandon Fullmer filed suit against Tracy, asking a federal court to prevent the Utah County sheriff and other officials from closing down any future legal raves. But despite his outrage over the sheriff’s actions — and the larger outrage in the world beyond Utah — it now appears that the authorities in the county will face no trouble for the raid. County officials have sided with Tracy and on Thursday a federal judge in Salt Lake City denied the rave promoters’ demand to enjoin the sheriff from closing down any future legal raves in Utah County.

“The sheriff has essentially said that we don’t want these kinds of concerts in our county,” says Brian Barnard, Fullmer’s attorney. “They don’t want concerts for young people in our county — they don’t want electronic music, kids hanging out all night long. It’s a prejudice and a fear of young people.”

Folks uninitiated in the rave scene will be surprised by the logistical complexities involved in putting on an all-night dance party for a couple thousand people. A good rave with popular DJs and a great sound system requires the kind of planning and attention to detail that would do a White House advance team proud. This is the sort of rave that Fullmer, a record-store manager and veteran Salt Lake City party promoter, began planning in April, four months before the event was to be held.

Fullmer, who says he has put on more than 100 parties during the past decade, thought of everything. The venue he chose for his Aug. 20 rave, a 350-acre parcel of land owned by local ranchers, is a prized location for concerts. Set in a section of Spanish Fork Canyon called Diamond Fork, it’s far from any populated area, giving ravers a great deal of space, and peace of mind, to dance, to make noise, to camp out, to have fun. Because the party was to last all night — attendees were encouraged to bring their camping gear — Fullmer outfitted the place with a host of amenities to keep kids happy and safe. He rented dozens of portable toilets and contracted with a team of security guards and with Spanish Fork Ambulance, the local emergency medical team, to staff the rave. Early in August, Fullmer applied for and was granted a mass-gathering permit for the rave from the Utah County Health Department.

Most important, Fullmer saw to the music. He hired a team of stagehands and audio technicians — there would be two simultaneous stages — and assembled a line-up of drum ‘n’ bass stars from around the world, including DJ Craze, from Miami; Seattle’s DJ Syze; Spor, from London; and Atlanta’s Evol Intent. Fullmer began selling tickets at his record store for $15 (tickets purchased at the gates were $25); he called the rave Versus II, a kind of sequel to a previous rave he’d organized — only, his advertisement promised, three times better.

In the weeks leading up to the rave, while Fullmer carried out plans for the event, Sheriff Tracy set his sights on disrupting it. Tracy is suspicious of raves; he says they are a breeding ground for drug and alcohol use, for sexual assaults on women, and for violence of other kinds. This is not, he insists, just an idle belief on his part — Tracy says previous raves within his jurisdiction have caused just this sort of trouble, so when he became aware of Versus II, he knew the crowd would be up to no good.

Versus II opened its gates at around 9 p.m. on Saturday evening. In the three hours before the cops burst in, between 800 and 1,000 people streamed into the place. According to several members in the crowd, there were no sexual assaults or violent incidents of any sort. Mark Byers, one of the half-dozen emergency medical service officers present, attests that there were no health problems. Security personnel at the gates did search ravers as they came in, and according to Fullmer, various types of contraband were confiscated. The rave then uncoiled as planned — lights pulsed, music blared across the canyon, and people danced.

Tracy, though, had no eye for the entertainment. He had inserted undercover personnel in the crowd, and in the three hours after the gates opened, he says, the agents made five purchases of illegal substances. Drugs were all over the rave, he says, and so he decided to act. He called in the helicopters and ground troops.

For ravers in the crowd, the first sign that anything was amiss came with the lights of a chopper cresting over a nearby ridge. “It gets to be about 11:30 and we all see this light coming from over the mountains and it gets closer and closer,” Ashley Hawker, Fullmer’s girlfriend, described in an e-mail. “Then it starts shining its light on the entire crowd. That’s when I look to my right and … I see a guy dressed in all green camo and carrying a gun and wearing a helmet. I thought my eyes had deceived me but following right behind him are more big green men carrying fully automatic guns. My whole body starts shaking uncontrollably.” Many ravers emphasized the speed with which the police descended; one minute, everything appeared normal, and the next minute, the crowd was surrounded by uniformed men with guns. “It was a military siege,” says Jessica Riley, a 25-year-old raver and student at Humboldt State University who attended the party that night. “The light is sweeping all over the ground, and there are all these kids standing there trying to figure out what is going on. The quickness shook a lot of people.”

Bewildered as they were, many ravers immediately began to document the raid. “Every single kid with a camera and a phone pulled it out and started taking pictures,” Riley says. The move seems to have infuriated the cops. On Coombs’ video, you can hear the officers yelling at him to turn off his camera, and on a discussion page documenting personal accounts from the raid, several people say they witnessed kids getting attacked by the cops for refusing to give up their cameras.

Once they were among the crowd, officers directed people toward the exits — sometimes refusing to allow them to pack up their camping gear — and began to deal harshly with anyone who resisted. Alaisha Matagi, a 24-year-old woman in the crowd, later posted online that when an officer “in full army attire” told her to leave, she asked, “What’s going on?” “At which point I was brutally attacked,” she wrote. “Thrown to the ground and in the scuffle punched in the face by SWAT. That was not it either. I suppose I posed some threat as another SWAT member rushed over to subdue me to the ground putting his knee in my back and arresting me. At that point I am screaming to a patron ‘what’s going on?’ He is just as confused as I am. At that point another SWAT member came over and kicked me in the leg. Let me tell you that I also only weigh 130 pounds. I had three grown men attack and beat me and throw me to ground for absolutely no reason at all. Not to mention being dragged to a van and violently being tossed in and taken to jail. Fined for resisting arrest and another outrageous charge [failure to obey police].” Matagi’s account is supported by Coombs’ video — she’s the woman in the red-hooded sweatshirt being held to the ground by many officers — as well as by several witnesses who spoke to Salon.

In interviews and on message boards, other ravers described additional instances of harsh tactics by the police. Some people say tear gas was used; others say Taser weapons were drawn and fired. Several in the crowd point out that in infrared footage of the scene shot from the police helicopter that night, an officer in the air can be heard directing officers on the ground to fire a Taser at some people. And virtually everyone who spoke to Salon said they saw officers drawing and pointing automatic weapons at ravers, and that this tactic really freaked people out. Heath McBee, who owns an audio firm called Euphoric Beats and was handling the sound that evening, says he was resting on a cot in his truck when officers slammed open his doors and began yelling at him to shut the music down. “I woke up to an M-16 pointed at me,” McBee says, like nothing he’d ever seen in nine and a half years of working raves.

The sheriff says the ravers are mistaken. “We don’t have any M-16s,” Tracy says. He acknowledges that officers at the rave did have Taser weapons as well as tear gas and either sidearm pistols or rifles, but that equipment is standard issue for all police officers, he insists. “It would be no different if a guy got stopped on the road.” And even though officers carried those weapons, they didn’t use them, the sheriff says. In a couple of instances officers pointed but did not fire their Tasers, according to Tracy; but he says he’s aware of no instances in which officers pointed guns or used tear gas.

Tracy also defends the officers’ practice of surrounding ravers and pushing them to the ground, as we see them doing to Matagi in the Coombs video. “That’s standard procedure,” Tracy says. “What we do is take them to the ground, wrestle them till we get their hands. Now you see a guy with a knee on her back and you ask why you need to do that. But officers have been shot and killed and stabbed by people who weighed 90 pounds and were actively resisting arrest.” Tracy says the takedown procedure was used sparingly — just two or three times — that night.

Not only does Tracy believe his officers acted with restraint, he also says that his decision to shut down the party can be seen, in retrospect, as wise. Many drugs were confiscated at the party, he says, and of the 30 or so people arrested that night — most for disobeying or resisting officers — a handful were charged with possession.

The rave promoters say Tracy’s drug argument is bogus. They say the bulk of the contraband was in possession of the security guards, who had confiscated it from the crowd. Tracy doesn’t buy the story. The security guards’ possession of drugs was still illegal, he says, as they should have notified police of the contraband as soon as they discovered it. Tracy also says that he personally found drugs as he walked around the grounds after the raid.” I picked up a bag off the ground,” he says. Tracy says he found marijuana, cocaine, Ecstasy, methamphetamines and mushrooms. “For the size of area we picked those up in, I consider that a large amount.”

The sheriff claims ravers were dangerously high. One woman — whom Tracy did not name — was found to be close to overdosing on Ecstasy, with a resting pulse rate of 176. But Tracy’s claims have been difficult to verify: The woman he cites was not sent to a hospital; she was allowed to go home to her parents. Indeed, an investigation into the health situation at the rave yields cloudy results.

Byers, one of the ambulance personnel, tells Salon that no medical people saw any signs of danger regarding the health conditions at the rave. Asked whether anyone at the medical booth had heard reports of overdosing kids at the rave before the cops came in, Byers says, “None that we’re aware of — nothing that anyone reported to us.”

In an affidavit filed with a federal court after Fullmer sued Tracy, the medical people at the party appeared to reverse their story. They said that in fact they were concerned that drug use could cause heart attacks among people at the rave. It’s unclear why the two stories diverge — ambulance personnel could not be reached for further questions on the matter.

In any case, other rave experts who were present — including Jonathan Meader, the Salt Lake City coordinator for DanceSafe, a national organization that promotes healthy conditions at dance parties — say Versus II was well-managed. Meader says he’d rank it as being “one of the higher-caliber parties” in terms of safe conditions for partiers.

Fullmer and other ravers argue that police violently overreacted in shutting down the event. If Tracy had talked to them about his concerns before police busted in, they would have tried to accommodate him, they insist. They say that his reluctance to do so suggests a cultural bias; you can find drugs at virtually any public event, from NASCAR to a Stones concert, but only at a rave do cops think they have carte blanche to storm in with choppers and tear gas.

“My reaction is that this is not justification to close down a concert,” says Barnard, Fullmer’s attorney. “My guess is that at any large concert of young people’s music there is a going being smoking in the bathroom, marijuana exchanging hands in the facility. The mere fact that criminal conduct occurs by an individual patron does not justify shutting down the venue. If people are passing a joint down the row at a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert, that does not justify sending storm troopers in to close the concert.”

Now that a federal judge has rejected Barnard’s argument, it’s not clear what recourse ravers have. Many say they will now feel unsafe at raves — fearful of the cops. Ravers still plan to organize — to protest against and to document police misconduct online — but they worry that the public won’t rally behind their case. “I think it’s a cultural thing,” says Meader of DanceSafe. “The Utah cops are saying, ‘Our way of life is right. Yours isn’t.’”

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”