BART Disables Cell Service To Disrupt Protests 440
1729 writes "Yesterday, in an effort to disrupt rumored protests at Bay Area Rapid Transit stations, BART officials disabled cell phone and internet access within most of the BART system by shutting down the antennas that enable reception in the underground stations."
Solidarity (Score:5, Interesting)
When Poland's workers organized to protest the Communist government, one of the government's countermeasures was to disable the phone system.
My mother remarked at the time how unimaginable it was to live in a place where the phones could stop working because the government wanted them to.
Just so we're clear... (Score:3, Interesting)
If an unfriendly group (let's call it a "terrorist cell") wanted to disrupt phone & internet service for an attack, they just have to let BART know in advance that they're planning a protest? Hmm - not sure if they thought this one through...
The rest of this story is business as usual. The disruption of emergency service makes this a serious boner on their part.
Re:Won't BART be financially liable (Score:5, Interesting)
If someone needs to dial for help and they can't because BART has disabled cell phone service?
No. There are telephones with a direct line to BART employees on every platform. If a problem occurs on a train itself, there are phones with a direct line to the train operator at both ends of every car of every train. The same phones are routinely used by BART maintenance staff to communicate with train operators, so with rare exceptions they are always available and in service. You are much better off alerting the train operator of a problem on a train than calling 911 and waiting for emergency services to find a way to contact the operator.
Totally Illegal (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought Internet access was a human right? (Score:5, Interesting)
OMFG for months we've been hearing western nations cry bloody murder over Middle eastern government oppresive measures against their own telecom infustructures...
This colminated with the fucking UN declaring Internet access to be a human right.
Now we have ourselves some relatively minor incidents of civil unrest and the very same (mostly european) countries are doing the very same shit they were previously so adamantly against.
I hope BART gets sued to hell.
Re:Solidarity (Score:5, Interesting)
What is interesting is it didn't take our country very long to leap to this kind of tactic. This "protest" didn't even make national radar and they are ready to start pulling stuff like this off on people? Nobody got fired for this, there isn't even an outcry from any authority figure.
I am afraid the facade of freedom in this country is about to come tumbling down. Authority figures here will NOT be intimidated, and if you make them afraid, they will destroy you. You had better learn to do as your told. This last decade this country has changed for the worse. Its nothing like I grew up in, this is not your parent's America.
If you think you are going to protest here if they don't want you to, you are insane. Take a look at the G8 riots here. We have state of the art crowd control and the political will to use it. They will use the military on us, they have used the military on us and got away with it. This is a fight that was lost long ago at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. When the authorities were allowed to get away with that, our fate was sealed.
All the pieces are in place. Follow the propaganda from outfits like Fox News. They have marginalized the "entitlement" people already, they are ready for them to riot so they can dispose of them. They have been tying the London rioters to our "entitlement" people, it falls into their agenda to demonize "the liberals" and this fosters a transition to fascism, as they have someone to "get rid of to make it all better". This is very much history repeating itself. If you don't think it can happen here, you are a fool. No country woke up thinking they could ever slip into this kind of nightmare, but it happens and can happen very fast.
I have never seen America so polarized, both sides are charged up, it's potentially more charged I feel than the 60s, because this has been a slow cooking pot of trouble. Well, this is America, we don't do things in half measures, when it blows up here, the world will be in awe. What people haven't considered is how much information about making weapons and bombs is on the Internet. You find videos of it all over the Internet. This was rare, hard to find information when I was a kid and we still had a few that played with it.
Think of what crazy kids here have at their disposal? Forget guns. Guns would be actually more forgiving, considering the lack of armor piercing rounds available. When it gets ratcheted up to improvised bomb launchers that are combination armor piercing and anti personal, our riot cops will get shredded into hamburger in the streets.
This is why I find this BART action to shutting down the tech to be alarming. If the authorities clamp down on peaceful protest, they just make people in more angry, and increase the chance of escalating this. If people can vent, and feel they are being heard, this goes a LONG ways towards perpetuating a lawful society. If you shut people down, after they have been told all of their lives that they are a free people and have the right to assemble and be heard, you become their enemy. This gives people a reason in it's self to hate you and want you gone. Stack that up on top of any legitimate or perceived to be legitimate grief they have and you start having a recipe for revolt.
The establishment is not obliged to be stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're going to rebel, bring your own communications. If you want a handbook for this you could do worse than this [wikipedia.org].
And remember: the ultimate responsibility of a rebel is to provide a better system than he supplants, else history will judge him harshly.
Re:Just where do you think "rich and connected" we (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, no. The unique feature of the Soviet system was that while the top connected individuals were indeed surrounded by privilege, they were never technically rich. Most top Soviet officials and their families lived in apartment buildings which were tiny compared to a typical house of an even minor Western industrialist or a politician.
The aphrodisiac of the Soviet system was raw unchallenged power over others, not wealth.
It is only after the system collapsed when the "oligarchs" "buying" entire national industries for pennies on a dollar during Yeltsin's drunken binges appeared.
Which precautions have clearly failed in the West. Hence my point. Democracy and its "checks and balances" are now completely circumvented for good. Results are sure to follow.
I think that particular fallacy is called "It Can't Happen Here!". Lots of "Good Germans" swore by a similar idea. Note to the history-challenged: pre-Nazi germany was a Western (by definition) Constitutional Democracy (called the Weimar Republic).
Most people did not have a "bulled in the pan" in Germany in 1930 either.
But when my memories of crossing the Soviet border (something you clearly never did) circa early 1980s compare favourably with those of the USA border of 2010, something is clearly wrong with this picture, don't you think?
Absent an armed revolution, Fascism is not an all-or-nothing, black-or-white deal when one day you live in a freedom-loving, personal-liberties-cherishing place and the next morning a Fascist Dictatorship. Instead, Fascism (or systems like it) are introduced via a creeping progression, always.
And the West has been creeping towards it for two good decades, at first slowly, now rapidly accelerating. Just use your head: in the 1950s USA the "porn scanners" and "full body gropes" (of children, no less) would have been unthinkable and would have been - quite correctly - seen as an idea straight form a Soviet or a Nazi playbook. Fast forward to 2011....
Also when one talks about Fascism, or Fascism-like progressions, it is given that there will not be an exact repetition of the events of the mid 20th century. History never repeats itself exactly, it merely plays on the same theme. The new rendition of the oppression will be quite different in technical details, but very much the same as far as its victims are concerned (for example its most likely it will be Moslems in the camps - which will be euphemistically called something entirely different, instead of Jews).
Re:Stupid slope (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if you saw the same video I did. What I saw was no accident - it was an execution.
That "taser" excuse doesn't wash; if the suspect is face down on the ground with a cop kneeling on his back, what's the taser needed for?. The only "mistake" that happened that day was that the killer cop didn't think that he'd be filmed as he executed the black guy.