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After Cell-Phone Switch-Off, Anonymous Promises BART Protest

Posted by timothy on from the foolproof-plan dept.

According to the San Francisco Appeal, the cellphone service shut-down that the BART system imposed Thursday (by disabling transponders which allow cellphone communications in the underground portion of the system), besides drawing rebukes from various civil liberties groups, has generated plans for a protest Monday organized by Anonymous.

4 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Oh, they can fuck right off. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People have the right to protest all they want, but:

    1) BART has no obligation to assist them in doing so. BART had every right to turn off their equipment. Do these protesters expect to have the police drive them to the protest as well?

    2) If the protesters are interfering with mass transit, they're just being assholes. Yes, it's sad that someone got killed. No, this doesn't mean that tens of thousands of people should have their schedules fucked around with.

    The fact that this is such a big deal in the first place shows that these aren't real protesters anyway. They're just a bunch of spoiled SF kids thinking they're activists. Real activists wouldn't let something like not having internet access during the protest get in their way.

    1. Re:Oh, they can fuck right off. by FxChiP · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm disproving myself:

      1.) Cell phone service was not disrupted directly following the shooting. (Which would have been worse!)
      2.) The shooting I'm thinking of is Oscar Grant III, which was two years ago and probably resolved by this point.

      I apologize, I flew off without actually knowing what the hell was going on, instead extrapolating from the admittedly limited information and summaries I was seeing on Twitter and taking in the wrong order and the wrong way. I was totally desynched from the truth. My fault.

    2. Re:Oh, they can fuck right off. by sjames · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not really. BART is NOT a private corporation. Those repeaters are NOT private property. It was/is financed through sales taxes levied by the local government.

      They have no more right to shut down cell service to block free speech than the post office would to refuse to deliver flyers mailed by a protest group.

      They DO have a right to insist that any protest be carried out in an orderly manner and that it not endanger the safety of others.

      They sure like the benefits (like tax funding) they get from being a quasi-government body (www.bart.gov), so they will just have to deal with the downside.

  2. Re:This isn't the main event, it's just the warmup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's two things going on that aren't the same thing at all. One is the protests over police using black people for target practice, the other is the looting that takes place during the "riots".

    Here's a tip for those in California - did you know that you white folks are in the minority there? Sleep well...

    Um, dude? The man who was shot, Charles Hill, was not black.

    He was, however, intoxicated, violent, and armed. He threw a vodka bottle at two police officers and then attacked one with a knife. The police (or pigs or whatever the PC term is now) shot him in self defense. There's partial video of the incident—he was out of camera range, but the video shows the bottle flying at the officer who is in the picture. It happened very quickly: the officers saw Hill, he threw the bottle at them and charged brandishing a knife, and the police shot him all in under a minute. It's the kind of situation no one wants to have happen, but not because the police are some sort of racist murderers waging class warfare: rather, because no one wants knife-wielding drunks rampaging in the subway.

    Are the pigs guilty of keeping the black man down and put "those people" in their place because they didn't decide to hug and sing kumbaya with the drunk white guy trying to stab them? Probably, in the minds of some people. I would say that you can see their pictures here: http://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/2931/bart-protest-delays-evening-commute/ , but they at least have a photo of Charles Hill and seem cogent enough, despite trying to climb on top of the BART trains, to know enough about the case they're "protesting" at least to realize that Hill isn't black.