Last Thursday at four o’clock in the afternoon in San Francisco, rush
hour is beginning when many people make their way towards the stations of the
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to take a train back home
Hypocritical Americans Disable Social Networks to Prevent Free Assembly
"The
West is now running the risk of a great hypocrisy: that which is censorship in
Tehran or Cairo, would be a reasonable security measure if applied in San
Francisco or London. Authoritarian countries like Iran or China await nothing more."
The mild-mannered Bay Area Rapid Transit system: Once lauded for being the first U.S. transit system to enable system-wide cell phone use, it may be the first American system to shut down cell and Internet access to its customers to prevent a public protest.
It's last Thursday, four
o’clock in the afternoon in San Francisco. The rush hour is beginning, so large
numbers of people make their way toward Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations to
catch a train home. In four stations, however, something unexpected happens:
for a good three hours, until seven o’clock in the evening, all cell phones
stop working. Doctors on call, managers, nervous parents, and many others can
do nothing but fix their eyes on mute screens and wonder about the cause of the
blackout. They don’t know it yet - they’ll find out the next day - but the
cause is not, as one might naturally think, a serious technical problem. Rather,
without warning and in an unprecedented decision, BART turned off all the cell
phones of its customers.
What led BART - which is a
public agency - to do during these hours what the Web is calling a “Muburak,”
alluding to the disabling of cell phone and Internet access ordered by Egypt's
deposed rais [ruler] during the
uprising a few months ago?
Security reasons, BART said
yesterday. In fact on Thursday, during those hours and in those stations, a rally
against the killing of a homeless person by a BART security agent last July 3rd
had been planned. It was a rally that BART has been trying to prevent, apparently
with success, since no such event has been held, and since the indiscriminate
disabling of cell phone service began in areas considered hot zones.
Let us reflect for a moment:
a transit company, by means of an exclusively internal decision-making process,
decides without warning to terminate the capacity of private citizens to communicate
(moreover, with modes of communication citizens pay for) by invoking generic
security needs.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Not surprisingly, in addition
to the indignation on the Net, the leading American civil rights organizations,
including the American
Civil Liberties Unionand the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, have already strongly
condemned BART's actions and have launched legal battles. The restraint of free
speech, particularly the right to free assembly, is indeed evident.
Yet it is stunning that precisely
during the hours BART was preparing to disconnect the phones, British Prime Minister
David Cameron was
announcing that his government seriously consider the notion of suspending the
services of Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry, in case of “credible threats of
violence.”
This was an official reaction
to the role of technology in England's recent riots. After the Californian
“Mubarak,” will we also soon have a London “Mubarak”? After Tahrir Square and
Embarcadero Station … Trafalgar Square?
It is urgent to remind all
of those who are tempted to turn the switch that just a few months ago, this same
technology, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, was rightly celebrated as an
important enabler of the Arab Spring.
The West, in other words, is
running the risk of a great hypocrisy: that which is censorship in Tehran or Cairo,
would be a reasonable security measure if applied in San Francisco or London.
Authoritarian countries like Iran or China await nothing more than to return to
sender any of our future criticisms - and perhaps with greater ease purchase our
best surveillance technology.
In this moment, the West must
resist emotionality and demonstrate with deeds that it believes what it
preaches to others: to be more precise, full respect for the rights of
citizens, even if that entails more work and complexity. It must do so to
guarantee that if a phone suddenly goes silent, it's only because you forgot to
charge it.
