This heavy-handed response was apparently the idea of BART's public relations department.
Protesters gathered on Bart platform on August 15, WITH cellphone service (photo by Bob Patterson)
ACLU asked for the FCC to get involved. They have. FCC Spokesman Neil Grace stated, in an email:
"Any time communications services are interrupted, we seek to assess the situation. We are continuing to collect information about BART's actions and will be taking steps to hear from stakeholders about the important issues those actions raised, including protecting public safety and ensuring the availability of communications networks."
There was some question, at first, over whether BART had the cellphone service providers cut off service or whether BART cut it off. The Wall Street Journal reports that BART cut off the service from cellphone antennas that it owns and rents to phone service providers.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation commented on the service shut-down,
"... cutting off cell phone service in response to a planned protest is a shameful attack on free speech. BART officials are showing themselves to be of a mind with the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, who ordered the shutdown of cell phone service in Tahrir Square in response to peaceful, democratic protests earlier this year. Free speech advocates have called out British Prime Minister David Cameron for considering new, broad censorship powers over social networks and mobile communication in the UK, and we are appalled to see measures that go beyond anything Cameron has proposed being used here in the United States." " Cell phone service has not always been available in BART stations. The advent of reliable service inside of stations is relatively recent. But once BART made the service available, cutting it off in order to prevent the organization of a protest constitutes prior restrain on the free speech rights of every person in the station, whether they're a protestor or a commuter. Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. Censorship is not okay in Tahrir Square or Trafalgar Square, and it's still not okay in Powell Street Station."
PCWorld.com reports "The hacker collective Anonymous also joined the cause and on Sunday broke into myBART.org , releasing the personal information of thousands of users. The information breach did not include any financial information such as credit card numbers and BART has shut down myBART temporarily while it investigates the breach."
The "Anonymous" group released the following press release describing their plans relating to BART:
" This is just a brief release to clarify for the media what to expect from Anonymous on this Op. There is a more thorough Press Release from us here - http://tumblr.com/xjh42d529qAnonymous will take the following actions over the next 48 hours.
1) We have begun at once a massive Black Fax and E-Mail Bomb action, where we will fill every inbox and fax machine at BART with thousands of copies of our message that this outage was unacceptable.
2) Tomorrow, Sunday - August 14, 2011 at High Noon Pacific Time we, Anonymous - will remove from the internet the web site of BART located at www.bart.gov for exactly six hours. That's twice as long as they shut off the cell phones for.
3) On Monday - August 15, 2011 at 5:00 PM Pacific Time there will be a physical protest at the Civic Center Bart Station. Expect us !
We sincerely hope that this series of actions will serve as a warning to BART and every public organization in the USA to NOT engage in this sort of dangerous and human rights violating behavior.
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