Last week the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco shut down cellular phone service at all four of its downtown stations to preemptively subvert a planned protest of a shooting by a BART police officer. BART officials “switched off the transit system’s base stations,” writes Natalie Wolchover for Scientific American. WiFi Rail provides the underground fiber service that connects to a network of wireless access points, routers, and switches. Because the system is privately owned and operated by BART, its officials have the ability to shut it down.
Whether BART has the right to shut down its privately owned network providing cellular phone service to the transit system is another question entirely. BART, after all, is a government agency.
Early this week, the hacker group Anonymous staged another protest against the BART shutdown of cellular service. This time BART physically closed the four downtown stations and deployed officers in riot gear, but cellular service was not shut down.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that BART spokesperson Linton Johnson “said earlier Monday that the agency had the right to cut cell phone service Thursday [11 August] because transit riders ‘don’t have the right to free speech inside the fare gates.’” Oh, really? Someone needs to be sent for some sort of reorientation.
The Chronicle goes on to report, “The agency did not jam cell signals, which is illegal, but shut off the system—which Johnson said is allowable under an agreement with several major phone service providers that pay rent to BART.”
David Kravets, writing for Wired, reports Johnson, a former television reporter in San Jose, acknowledged in a conference call with reporters that the cellular phone system shut down was his idea. “It came to me in the middle of the morning,” Kravets reports Johnson as saying. “I sent it to the police department and they said they liked it. They started vetting it.”
At least one of BART’s directors, Lynette Sweet, opposes disruption of cellular service and will bring the issue for a vote. “This is one where we can almost say we’re stuck on stupid,” Sweet told the Chronicle. “We put ourselves on the radar screen for no good reason. This is a country that champions civil liberties all the time. So why would a transit agency take it upon themselves to trample on civil liberties?”
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking into the matter.
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