A few months ago San Francisco BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) authorities disabled the WiFi capacity in the subway to prevent flash mobs from disrupting operations in the underground stations by gathering suddenly in response to a Tweet.
The protesters were outraged by two fatal shootings by BART police in recent months.
In one, a young BART cop, Johannes Meserle, attempted to use his Taser, an electric shock device, to subdue a suspect, Oscar Grant, who was being held down, lying prone, by fellow officers. In reaching for what he thought was his Taser, the officer unholstered his service revolver and shot the man dead; the officer was charged with murder, found guilty by a jury of manslaughter, and served a term in state prison.
The recent protesters would suddenly gather as a group underground and disrupt operations, making it difficult for ordinary riders to enter or exit the station.
So shutting off the protesters' ability to alert each other to assemble to disrupt transportation was a good thing, right?
Not so fast.
Why?
Because in shutting down the ability of the protesters to communicate, BART authorities, a quasi-governmental agency with rule-making and enforcement authority, was also interfering with the ability of non-protesters riding the subway to communicate.
Why is that important?
Suppose the ordinary rider wanted to call the police or fire department? Or BART officials? Or family members? Or someone at their destination to advise that they'd be delayed?
Why should the actions of a few cause the elimination of your right to communicate, assuming that you are an ordinary rider not interested in joining the protest?
After much public discussion, BART authorities saw the error of their ways, under threat of federal investigation...it is a federal crime to interfere with electronic communications under the anti-wiretapping section 605 of the Federal Communications Act...and decided that it was better to protect freedom of communication for all than to shut it down for all to thwart some.
What raises this issue again is that Britain has had to face the same issue as to whether the activity of some in using the new electronic communication media such as text messaging and tweeting should result in shutting it down for all in order to thwart messages that the government dislikes.
Recall that earlier this year, in what is called the Arab Spring, governments have been overthrown in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, with uprisings in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, against autocratic governments. Saudi has taken preventive measures to avoid uprisings arising in the first place.
In one of the world's great examples of the law of unintended consequences, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak tried to cancel the ability of the protesters in Cairo from summoning supporters to Tahrir Square by shutting down the central, government controlled, electronic communications facility.
This will teach them, Mubarak's lieutenants must have figured, now they won't be able to call each other to assemble.
Ironically, even more people began to assemble, spontaneously, it seemed, and the anti-Mubarak demonstrations grew even more powerful, despite the lack of ability to text and tweet each other.
What had happened?
Many of the supporters of the protests had been armchair supporters, cheering them on privately by watching on TV or the internet. Without the abiliity to receive messages, many of them figured, "I'd better go down to the square to see for myself." The passivist had been turned into activists.
If you were a Mubarak supporter, would you have imagined that this could happen?
So the British government, after at first supporting the power of government to shut down the ability of demonstrators and rioters (such as at Tottenham, a London suburb, recently, where flash mobs burned stores and buildings over a period of several nights), has now decided that shutting down the rioters' communications ability was poor policy; for one thing, it prevented the authorities from reading the text and email traffic in order to assess the magnitude and location of the threat. Here's the article.
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