During his 24 hours in lockup, his bike was inspected and praised by bomb-squad technicians, while detectives traded Polaroids of his creation and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force questioned whether he knew violent protesters. Kinberg's charges were later dropped, on the condition he not get arrested again for six months.
It wasn't until December of last year that Kinberg learned his arrest was less spontaneous than it appeared.
He received a phone call from Gideon Oliver, an attorney enmeshed in a series of suits against the NYPD challenging the department's mass arrests, fingerprinting policies and detention conditions. Oliver revealed that Kinberg had been one of many targets of the NYPD's "RNC Intelligence Squad," which had been traveling around the country infiltrating progressive groups and building secret files on potential rabble-rousers ahead of the convention.
"My project was all very public because I didn't want there to be any mystery as to what this was," Kinberg told Wired News. "The NYPD acted as the law enforcement arm of the Republican Party. That's not how this country is supposed to work."
Joshua Kinberg, now the CEO of social media software company FireAnt, wanted to ride a dot-matrix, internet-enabled, chalk printer bike around the streets of New York in 2004 during the Republican National Convention. The New York Police Department arrested him before he could start, but it wasn't until late in 2006 that Kinberg learned the cops had created a file on him prior to the convention.
