The unprecedented action of BART officials who preempted an Aug. 11 anti-police brutality demonstration by shutting down underground mobile phone service for three hours has resulted in a fierce backlash of disruptive tactics by the loosely-affiliated ring of hackers known as “Anonymous.”
On Aug. 14, Anonymous took credit for several actions against BART, including sending “black faxes,” hacking the myBART.org website and publishing 2,001 names, passwords and in some instances addresses and phone numbers, of BART customers who use the site.
According to a statement attributed to Anonymous and widely distributed online, the myBART user database was poorly protected and the disclosure of it did not endanger anyone’s financial information.
Any eight-year-old with an Internet connection could have done what we did,” the statement said. “None of the info, including the passwords, was encrypted. It is obvious BART does not give a [expletive deleted] about its customers.”
On Aug. 15, another protest made up of about 50 activists was organized by Anonymous via posts on Twitter. It was a direct response to the July 11 communication shutdown.
BART responded by temporarily closing downtown stations, but did not shut down its cell phone service. Some protesters held their phones yelling “Can you hear me now?” and dispersed peacefully after a few hours.
Roots of controversy
The initial protest that took place on July 11 was a demonstration against the killing of Charles Blair Hill, a 45 year-old transient who was fatally shot by BART police at the Civic Center station on July 3.
The case is still under investigation and the officers involved said they acted in self-defense after Hill allegedly attacked them with a knife.
BART officials said they learned that social media websites, like Twitter, were going to be used on Aug. 11 to start another protest at downtown transit stations. In response, they shut down their own underground cell-phone and Wi-Fi service.
The protest never materialized, but the decision turned out to be a controversial one that gained larger media attention and inspired some commentators to draw parallels between the actions of BART officials and the mobile phone and internet shutdown tactics used by hard-line leaders in the Middle East to prevent protesters from communicating with each other and the outside world.
“Hosni Mubarak decided to basically flip the switch and muffle people that were out trying to turn over his regime,” said protester Anastasia Lozano-Garcia in an NPR interview. “This essentially is what has happened here at BART when they decided to flip their switch.”
But in an official statement, BART officials say their decision was “not made lightly” and was based solely on safety concerns. Their rationale was that the potential for chaos caused by protests in the stations “could [have] lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions.”
Still, other civil rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union are critical of BART’s decision and consider it a violation of free speech.
The Federal Communications Commission has started its own investigation into BART’s action.
Continued attacks
Last Wednesday the database for the BART police officer’s union was hacked and personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers and other private data for 220 of the transit agency’s officers and other employees, was stolen and posted on another website.
Anonymous didn’t officially take credit for the event, but the link with the private information was distributed during one of their on-line chats.
These people are criminals, and we’re going to forward this information to the FBI,” Phil Sekhon, president of the Bart Police Officer’s Association, said in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Nothing is protected in the electronic age … lesson learned.”