Cell Service Shutdown Raises Free Speech Questions : NPR

The shutdown of mobile phone service in San Fransisco Bay Area subway stations has constitutional experts hitting the law books.

 

A man is pulled off a commuter train at the Civic Center BART station on July 11 in San Francisco after climbing on top of it during a protest against the July 3 shooting by transit police of Charles Blair Hill. On Thursday, BART officials blocked cell service in some stations to prevent another protest.

Authorities for Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, blocked wireless signals in certain stations on Thursday in an attempt to prevent protests opposing the July 3 shooting death of Charles Blair Hill by BART police. Police say Hill came at them with a knife.

First Amendment scholars say they can’t remember a time when a public agency in the U.S. moved to disrupt wireless traffic in quite that way. Now, they’re trying to stretch old First Amendment principles to fit in the context of new technology.

‘A Major First Amendment Problem’

One group that promotes electronic freedom compared the people who run BART to an authoritarian regime in Egypt, tweeting “BART pulls a Mubarak in San Francisco.”

“It’s very clearly a major First Amendment problem whenever a government agency takes it upon itself to simply prevent people from being able to speak,” says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group.

via Cell Service Shutdown Raises Free Speech Questions : NPR.