There's an interesting debate going on here in the Bay Area. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency has been dealing with a lot of fallout since an officer involved shooting a few weeks ago, including one major disruption by protesters that I blogged about on July 12. In anticipation of another major protest last week, BART temporarily turned off cell phone service in some of it's terminals. No demonstration took place. In contrast, BART left the service in place yesterday and ended up closing four terminals because of demonstrators.
BART is taking considerable heat from the public, the ACLU, and the FCC for potentially violating the First Amendment by restricting free speech. It has been suggested that the demonstration yesterday was larger and more disruptive because of BART's actions last Thursday. The demonstration yesterday was allegedly instigated by Anonymous, a hacker group that hacked a contracted customer service site over the weekend and posted personal BART customer information on the web in retaliation for BART's decision to shut down cell service.
BART owns the cellular service in its terminals and believes that public safety concerns should outweigh a brief inconvenience to its riders. The agency maintains that the ability to shut down service in stations targeted for demonstrations is a valuable tool that can help diffuse risks to passengers.
This will be an interesting debate that will have a major impact on how we view social media. BART is a special government agency created by the State of California and we are right to be leery of any government restrictions on communications or the right to assembly. But does the use of cell phones and social media to organize protests rise to the level of a right? Is the right to free speech tied to the medium or the message? Is the use of social media by violent anarchists the equivalent of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater?
These are not easy questions. On the one hand, BART's reasons for the restriction seem to be in the public's best interest. However, case law permits demonstrations on railway platforms, so BART's action affects the organization of a protest - it cannot prevent the protest. We're already seeing attempts to curtail social media as an organizing tool in other countries both during the "Arab Spring" and more recently in England. In this context, I think that a debate on how far we go in restricting communications in the interest of public safety is both healthy and essential.
People have become very attached to their celluar service but it's not a right but rather a priviledge. If BART owns the celluar service in the terminals then they can turn it off whenever they want to. I'm not saying that BART turning it off like they did doesn't make me uncomfortable because it does draw the comparison to what's going in the Middle East.
At the end of the day BART is a business providing a service to their customers. If they chose to suspend some part of that service, whether it's the celluar or closing a terminal or reducing the number of trains, that's up to them.
Posted by: Cynthia | 08/16/2011 at 04:30 PM
People think of cost incurring privileges as "rights" which is not surprising given the entitlement mentality of so much of the cell phone generation.
Posted by: Gary | 08/16/2011 at 05:54 PM
Cynthia, it's not that simple. Federal law prohibits various bodies (including governmental ones) from interfering with emergency (911) services; this is why schools (which are governmental) cannot block cell service to eliminate texting during class. But BART is a governmental body, and case law as Lucius notes applies...
Bart blew it by how they applied their methods. The better method would have been to apologize for the service outage due to the overloading on the system.
But the "Anonymous" group was very wrong to hack and publish public information.
Posted by: John Schmidt | 08/16/2011 at 06:34 PM