{"id":957,"date":"2011-08-22T08:07:56","date_gmt":"2011-08-22T12:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=957"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:28:09","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:28:09","slug":"inhibiting-speech-by-throwing-a-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2011\/08\/22\/inhibiting-speech-by-throwing-a-switch\/","title":{"rendered":"Inhibiting Speech by Throwing a Switch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Wilson<\/em><\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2019s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) last week earned the ire of the hacker group\u00a0Anonymous<\/a>when it shut off cell phone service on train platforms\u2014 in anticipation of a protest over BART officers\u2019 fatal shooting of a knife-wielding man in the Civic Center station. That protest never happened, but the cell phone shutdown sparked\u00a0another<\/em>\u00a0protest, which did happen, on Monday. The cell phone shutdown prompted the ACLU of Northern California to\u00a0send a letter<\/a>\u00a0to BART Police Chief Kenton W. Rainey expressing its concern about BART\u2019s actions. The FCC is also investigating.<\/p>\n

The propriety of shutting down cell phone service in order to prevent or water down protests is a hot topic.\u00a0<\/span>In January, the Egyptian government shut down not only cell phone service, but also Internet access in Egypt, in order to prevent protests. British Prime Minister David Cameron is also calling for increased power to regulate cell phone service in the wake of last week\u2019s London riots.<\/p>\n

The BART incident is unfortunately not a terrific example of a prior restraint. The shutdown affected only paid areas of downtown San Francisco stations, not the lobby or above-ground public areas. (In\u00a0In re Hoffman<\/em>\u00a0(1967), the California Supreme Court said that the public area of a railroad station is a traditional public forum.) Comparisons to Mubarak are superficial at best, and at worst, they diminish the free speech crackdowns Egyptian protestors endured in January. The most persuasive argument against BART\u2019s actions is that a blanket cell phone shutdown prevented emergency calls. What BART did was, to use a legal term, \u201ca crappy thing to do,\u201d but it likely was not a violation of the First Amendment.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, speech crackdowns during protests are things that we in the United States think are limited to other places where speech is less valued than it is here. BART\u2019s cell phone shutdown was limited to an internal network that BART owned; there was nothing approaching a Fifth Amendment\u00a0taking<\/em>\u00a0in the sense that a government entity shut down a private company\u2019s network. But it\u2019s not hard to imagine that police departments would ask for a cell phone shutdown throughout a large part of a city, and it\u2019s not hard to imagine that the service providers would willingly assent. Phone companies have willingly done much worse in the recent past\u2014e.g., AT&T, Verizon, and others\u00a0consenting to National Security Agency spying<\/a>on their networks.<\/p>\n

Safety is always the reason cited for suppressing speech, but BART would not have shut down cell phone service if there were a massive, unwieldy\u00a0pro<\/em>-BART protest. By shutting down cell service on the platform, BART\u2019s clear intention was to prevent protestors from communicating, and in so doing, to prevent the protest from being effective. BART\u2019s actions, in isolation, don\u2019t amount to a whole lot, but in conjunction with other actions around the world, they represent a disturbing trend toward neutering effective protest with the flick of a switch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Wilson San Francisco\u2019s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) last week earned the ire of the hacker group\u00a0Anonymouswhen it shut […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-fr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}