"I want to see something so gigantic that it can't be misinterpreted," says Jason Flores-Williams, a political writer at High Times Magazine, who's been playing a dual role as a journalist covering the movement and an organizer shaping it. An intense man in his 30s with a shaved head and silver earring, Flores-Williams recently published the High Times Activist Guide to the Republican National Convention, which is part primer and part call to arms. In May, eager to kick off a summer of activism, he put together a small early-morning protest near Rockefeller Center and was arrested along with two others during a traffic-blocking die-in on Fifth Avenue.

For the RNC, he dreams of "a total expression of seething hatred that will go down in history as a moment in time when people stood up to the worst administration we've ever had."

Among other things, he envisions protesters locking down the streets of New York by chaining their arms together inside metal tubes, creating what's called a sleeping dragon. "You lock your arms in," he says. "When the cops come, they have to saw through these steel tubes. You get 30 people and you lock down a street for six hours. While this is happening, it gives other protesters a great opportunity to make their statement, to be further disruptive. They can lie down with these people, they can chant at the police, they can sit down where they are and be arrested for that or block further public space. They can disrupt the normal flow of society."

"It's coming together," he says with enthusiasm after a June meeting of a hundred or so anti-RNC activists at an East Village church. "Part of it is going to be fun and beautiful, but part of it has to instill fear into the power structure."

That won't be easy. The last four years have given police plenty of practice in instilling fear themselves. Relationships between cops and protesters have rarely been warm, but since Sept. 11, they've grown toxic, with law enforcement routinely denying march permits and using overwhelming force against nonviolent demonstrators.

In 2000 at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, police infiltrated activist groups and made mass preemptive arrests. The Democratic Convention in Los Angeles that year was little better. "Even protests with the city's permission have been met by legions of heavily armed police officers dressed in full riot gear," CNN reported. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of demonstrators, injuring protesters and journalists alike. "It looked like a reenactment of a Civil War battle," said Al Crespo, a photographer who was shot with a rubber bullet.

Since Sept. 11, things have only gotten worse. In the past three years, protest in America has increasingly come to resemble that in countries such as Egypt, where demonstrations are allowed only within tightly controlled spaces and riot police rush in at the first hint of spontaneity or disorder.

In April 2003, after the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center issued a bulletin about the potential for terrorist violence at an antiwar protest in Oakland, police opened fire on the peaceful crowd with wooden pellets.

It later turned out there had been no real basis for the terrorism warning. Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, told the Oakland Tribune that it was made because protest itself can be seen as a form of terrorism. "You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest," he said. "You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

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