MIAMI — Three protesters arrested at a 2002 rally attended by President Bush sued the U.S. Secret Service and others yesterday, arguing that their First Amendment rights were violated when they were arrested for refusing to picket inside specified zones.

Joe Redner, 63, Adam Elend, 26, and Jeff Marks, 31, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Tampa. They were arrested by Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies in November at a Gov. Jeb Bush campaign rally because they would not move into the Secret Service’s designated “free-speech zones.” The governor and president are brothers.

“These free-speech cages are an anathema to a free society,” Redner said.

The three men said they attended the rally at the University of South Florida specifically to protest the zones. Redner said his sign read “Don’t let these crooks fool you” on one side and a quote from a Supreme Court First Amendment decision on the other. The sign likened protest zones to “a safe haven for crackpots.”

Elend, who produces documentaries with Marks, said USF arena officials ordered them to a designated zone about a half-mile away.

“There were a couple hundred people there (at the protest zone), but you couldn’t see it from where the event was happening,” Elend said. Deputies arrested the men when they refused to move.

The suit names the Secret Service, the sheriff’s office, USF and Sun Dome Inc., which operates the public university’s arena. Neither the Secret Service nor the sheriff’s office returned phone calls for comment.

“We’re confident that the legal process will reveal that we didn’t violate anybody’s rights,” said Michael Reich, a spokesman for USF and Sun Dome Inc.

But Bruce Winick, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law, said he thinks the zones were too far from the rally.

Winick, who is not involved in the case, said the courts traditionally have allowed restrictions that are reasonable as to time, place and manner. For example, he said, a city could order that a protest be held a reasonable distance from a hospital if loud noise could interfere with patients’ healing.

But, he said, the restrictions must be applied equally to protesters and supporters.

“So the question is, ‘Is the Secret Service applying this in a viewpoint-neutral way?’ ” he said.

Elend said the Secret Service and deputies discriminated at the Tampa rally, mostly allowing those with pro-Bush and neutral signs to stay nearby, but sending anti-Bush protesters to the zone.

“They applied it totally based on the signs,” he said.

Redner, a strip club owner, said he understood that the Secret Service must do its job, “But if someone wanted to kill the president, I think I’d go with a sign saying ‘I love the president.’ ”

The three men said they’ve been protesting both Democrats and Republicans for years, calling their act “a freedom thing.” Redner said President Clinton’s Secret Service also employed protest zones. Elend encountered his first zones at the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.

“There were these giant fences around this parking lot with a line of LAPD in riot gear on every side of the zone,” he said. “It was very much a prison.”

The men were not the first to be arrested for violating the zones.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and 10 other members of Congress have written U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that charges be dropped against a South Carolina activist arrested last October for entering a restricted space around the president. Brett Bursey has argued he was arrested because of his sign’s message — “No more war for oil.”

Frank said yesterday that putting protesters is specified zones is wrong and that the Secret Service sometimes “forgets that this is a democracy.”

“We have a free-speech zone already,” Frank said. “It’s called the United States of America.”