Is cellphone use considered free-speech?Follow

This is kind of interesting:

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) 'turned off' cellphone use in the subways. Supposedly this was done to preempt the organization of protests following a controversial shooting by a BART officer.

The official word from BART is that it's necessary for safety.


Anyway the FCC is investigating the intentional interruption of communication services.

Was BART justified and/or within their rights in jamming cellphone signals in their subways?






Edited, Aug 16th 2011 4:55pm by Elinda

One concern would be access to emergency services. I'd assume that BART being the organization running the service there, they would be helping to get emergency services activated anyway, so that might be a moot point.

It's different to turn off cell phones during an emergency when people are already notified, rather then turning them off when they might need to be used to alert people about an emergency.

I don't think it's a free speech issue though.

Edited, Aug 16th 2011 10:24am by Xsarus

I just see the added benefit of not having to overhear multiple conversation about what someone is going to have for lunch.

Texting and Twitter I guess?

You'd have to step outside?

I had read about a (sensationalist-driven) version of this story yesterday. Apparently Anonymous decided this was a pretty big deal and published a list of subscribers to BART's website (which is totally a great way of "punishing" BART, right?).

Regardless, I don't see the use of the phones as a freedom of speech thing, nor do I think that BART is obligated to provide the service. However, I am pretty sure they came out and admitted to temporarily suspending the service only to prevent a protest. From source:


From that standpoint, eh. I think it's a moral gray area. The reasoning given was to protect the users of the service, but I think they could have handled themselves in a much better way.

Further reading, it appears that protests in the subway are illegal in that area. Why not let the idiots protest and get arrested, if they're going to do so illegally? I'm all for protecting people, but the folks at BART tossed themselves up on the chopping block.

Edited, Aug 16th 2011 12:17pm by ChanchanXI

Well, presumably, it'd be BART officers that'd be tasked with doing that arresting. I can see the logic in trying to preemptively stop protests, thereby avoiding the risk of confrontations for their police force. Seems the very reason that they were getting the flak was because of their police force...might be best not to put the object of people's ire right in front of them, and then ask them to start arresting those people in a crowd.

Seems like sound enough logic, just probably the wrong way of going about it.

Edited, Aug 16th 2011 12:26pm by Eske

Is this a joke? If cell phone use is considered a right protected under the first amendment, then why aren't we providing government issued phones to the masses?

I don't understand. A lot of loose analogies can be drawn. Gun possession is a protected right, but just about any establishment has their own right to ban guns on their premises. And, in the same sense, this company was trying to prevent inevitable disruption of their services.

And since when does anything Anonymous do deserve 1/10th of the attention it gets?