Mobile phone cut spurs US anger

Civil liberties groups have attacked a decision by a San Francisco regional subway authority to knock out mobile phone services last week before a planned demonstration, with some comparing the move to the actions of repressive Middle Eastern regimes.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority stopped the flow of data at a handful of downtown stations during the homeward commute on Thursday evening without notice. BART said it successfully thwarted a protest.

The demonstration was organised in the wake of the second fatal shooting of a suspect by BART police in recent years. BART officials said they were concerned that the protests on crowded platforms could have endangered riders.

“We need to have safe passage, that is why we took this action,” agency spokesman Jim Allison said on Sunday. “It was not an attempt to stifle information”.

The Bay Area is home to technology activists who have assisted in getting anticensorship and anti-monitoring tools in to the hands of protesters in Egypt, China and elsewhere, and they were infuriated at what they said was an unprecedented US shutdown that breached constitutional protections for free speech and assembly.

“Cutting off cell phone service in response to a planned protest is a shameful attack on free speech,” the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a statement posted to its website. “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.”

Noting calls by UK prime minister David Cameron to restrict social networking services during riots, the EFF said it was seeing “censorship stories move closer and closer to home”.

Some activists said via Twitter that they had filed complaints to the US Federal Communications Commission, and Mr Allison said he had briefed a press official there about what happened.

One branch of the activist hacking group Anonymous called on Saturday for a real-world protest on Monday. It asked supporters to bombard BART fax machines with black transmissions that consume ink.

BART compounded its difficulties with repeated changes to its explanation of events.

Early on Friday, the publicly funded agency said that it had asked the four wireless carriers serving the underground line to stop transmission. Then it said that it acted alone by cutting off power to the nodes that passed the signals along.

On Sunday, Mr Allison said that it was more complicated than that. “Suffice it to say, data delivery to the nodes on the platform level was interrupted,” he said. He said giving further detail could allow outsiders to disrupt communications in the future.

BART also conceded that the outage lasted longer and affected more stations than initially disclosed. Mr Allison said on Sunday that it ran from 4pm to 7:35pm at all eight San Francisco stations, double the number given out at first.