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BART Disables Cell Service To Disrupt Protests
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."
Enjoy your stay.
How long will it be before they just gas a place with knock-out gas in order to "keep the peace"?
in my city (Chicago) this is a "Value Added" type of service, for most of my life there was no cell reception down there, they even rolled them out one carrier at a time, I doubt they would be liable on a system that is not guaranteed to work since it is underground in a difficult place to get wireless communications.
There Can Be Only One...
Blocking calls to 911 and other emergency calls people might have to make seems like it could cause some problems.
Further, the only thing shut off was BART's own equipment. They were transparent enough to say "we shut off our gear rather than let you use it to organize against us", rather than blaming the outage on some sort of convenient hardware failure (or vandalism, which probably would have passed the sniff test under the circumstances). I can't imagine the cell sites outside the paid platform (which were left on) have zero spillover, so those who absolutely needed it could stand at the periphery while waiting for the next train.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The irony is that the communist government likely in many instances uses the same reasoning to explain to the people their reasons for doing what they do. (Papers please!) When you flip a coin over, it may have a different picture to appease you into thinking it is something different, but in reality it is only the other side of the same thing.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the ass clowns"
Many people trying to get home meanwhile the ass clowns...being ass clowns...
and in vancover they riot over losing a NHL game
what kind of doctor is poor enough to take a fucking subway/regional rail?
not a medical doctor who deals with emergency patient situations, for sure.
BART is not just for poor people.
But to answer your question...probably the kind of doctor that doesn't want to get stuck in the daily afternoon Bay Bridge traffic. For those that work close to downtown and live relatively close to a BART station, BART can be faster (sometimes *much* faster) than driving.
FWIW, I know a doctor who lives in the East Bay and takes BART, then walks to work. She's not an ER doc, but is called in to take on emergency Neurology cases at times. She could certainly afford to drive to work, but chooses to take BART for her 9-5 jobs, though she would drive in to take after hours emergencies.
One that has better things to do than spend a couple hours of his life every day at a simple but stressful, not particularly rewarding task of piloting a personal transportation unit through the notoriously heavy traffic of the bay area.
Maybe he wants to read medical journals, or goof off playing video games instead. Lots of things are better uses of your time. You should be able to drive when you want to, not because you have to be a mini-bus-driver just to get to your real job.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Absolutely. But even at the pace of modern life, it's a bit silly to argue that something only a couple years old could be necessary for free speech. Obviously people got by for (let's say) 10 years without it. Why is it a requirement all of a sudden?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's not that it's a requirement. If they took it down because it was too expensive, or it needed lengthy repairs, or whatever, I'd be fine with that. But when they cut off a mode of communication specifically to prevent people from communicating, that's when it becomes a problem. I expect that in Syria or Iran, not in the US.
No, paragraph 2:
"We don't want protesters interfering with the actual running of the system. Feel free to protest, but don't do it where people are actually trying to use the transportation system."
As someone who actually uses BART to get around, I very much appreciate them doing this.
Paragraph 2: "No First Amendment activities in the trains, boarding areas, or any other part of our property." (I love the "expressive activities" buzzphrase in this one)
No, the statement is that the platforms and trains are not public spaces, and if you interfere with the trains, you are de facto trespassing and they will have you arrested. I support PETA doing their thing on the sidewalks and in the parks, but I would take action if they ended up in my living room or if they disabled my vehicle.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
How can the platforms and trains of a public transport system (that is tax supported and even run by a state agency) not be public areas? This is explicitly not about interfering with the trains, it is about "expressive activity" i.e. exercise of everybody's constitutional freedom of speech. If you have a valid ticket you are not "de facto trespassing" either. Freedom of speech cannot be limited to "certain areas", it is either a universal, fundamental right or it makes no sense at all. If to exercise your freedom of speech you are required to go into a "Free Speech" cage, what kind of freedom is that?
They are not public areas in the sense that the area behind the counter of the DMV is not a public area. In order for it to function, there must be rules. You and 50 of your friends cannot just walk into a DMV and hang out in the back office simply because it is run by the government. Have you been to a BART station in San Francisco? They are tiny and completely packed. There is no conceivable way to hold a protest on one of the platforms below Market Street without shutting it down. It's like insisting on holding a parade on the only 1-lane road that is used by 100,000 people an hour. It's not going to be allowed. Set up shop on the side of the road, or set up shop in the BART station, but not on the platform. These are all fine.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
I think we are actually getting off topic here a little.
This has nothing to do with Free Speech. All Free Speech grants us is the right to the *opportunity* to speak freely to whomever can hear us. It says nothing that we shall be provided with communication capabilities to do so. Even, all the way back then, I don't think the Founding Fathers intended that every man shall have free and reasonable access to pen, ink, paper, a horse, and another man to effectively transmit your speech farther than the sound of your voice.
Aside from the 1st, there is the 14th and various laws designed to prohibit discrimination. So all people shall have equal access and be treated equally under the law.
Another poster pointed out that disrupting the cellular service in totality endangered the lives of citizens by preventing their access to emergency services during times of crisis or public disasters.
This does not have anything to do with the government with the big "G". This is not shutting down all communications during elections, or massive unrest and protest against unpopular legislation, etc.
What happened is that a few people, the supervisors of a transit system, made the decision to deny everyone access to communications (that we take for granted) in an area that until recently, would not be considered suitable for mobile and personal communication devices. It makes no difference if it is TCP/IP, Cellular communication, or pay phones back in the 70's.
The decision was made for a single reason........ disrupt the ability of organized protest against a transit system by the employees. Affecting their customers, and endangering them, would of required forethought, judgment, and intelligence. Clearly, these supervisors have none of these attributes. Additionally, their behavior clearly indicates a hostile and unreasonable stance on intelligent discourse between two parties to reach a mutually beneficial and accepted agreement.
As much as I would like to take the opportunity to rant about communications, power, infrastructure, and food production capabilities being too centralized and easily controllable by government, this is not an example of it.
For the protesters to use Free Speech as a strategy to combat this decision is a mistake, and the appropriate action is to enforce any laws that do exist to protect protests by workers, especially in private business, but also applying to government workers as well.
This is about unions, organized and collective bargaining rights, etc.
If these laws don't exist, then the correct action is bring attention that legislation needs to be introduced to protect it.
Of course, it would also be pretty smart to point out the public endangerment by those officials/supervisors and just get them straight fired and deal with the new people that take over their jobs.
The 1st Amendment does not give me free Verizon service. Just the right to say what I want on Verizon's network to anyone willing to listen. Verizon also has the right to refuse me service, as long as the grounds are not provably discriminatory.
Under normal circumstances, any business has the right to terminate communications service at will. Starbucks could disable their WiFi tomorrow, along with McDonald's and we would not be bitching about the 1st and the Man is harshing our mellow.
Where this is different, is that it caused two situations, both probably prohibited by policy and legislation:
1) It interfered with a protest by workers against a company. Either through civil court, or existing regulatory bodies, restitution and remediation can be found.
2) It endangered the public without a reasonable cause. A reasonable cause being, that it needed to be taken offline for 10 minutes for maintenance, or that hardware failure caused it.
Sorry, we can't rally around this to scream about Free Speech and the government taking away our rights on this one. Wrong situation.