[LINK] NYT: Hacktivism re BART Cellphone Suspension

[Roger Clarke]

After Cellphone Action, BART Faces Escalating Protests
By ZUSHA ELINSON
August 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/us/21bcbart.html

Early last month, a BART police officer shot and killed a 
knife-wielding homeless man at the San Francisco Civic Center 
station. The incident provoked a series of small protests that drew 
little attention until Aug. 11, when the transit agency took the 
unusual step of shutting down cellphone service for several hours as 
activists prepared for another rally.

With that flip of a switch, BART has come under siege - in cyberspace 
and underground.

According to officials, BART's technology personnel have been working 
round the clock to fend off a disparate group of hackers who 
penetrated the agency's Web sites last week and released sensitive 
information, in retaliation for the shutdown of the cellphone and 
wireless services.

The Federal Communications Commission is investigating the decision 
to shut down the services, and the American Civil Liberties Union is 
considering a lawsuit against BART on the ground of First Amendment 
violations.

The protests, while still small, appear to have grown in number and 
potency. Using the Twitter hashtag #MuBARTek, a wry reference to 
Hosni Mubarak's efforts to shut down communications before he was 
toppled as president of Egypt, activists organized a new round of 
protests that forced BART to shut down four stations during rush hour 
last Monday.

Another rally is planned for this Monday. Protesters threatened that 
more would follow "until BART decides to back away from their policy 
of cellphone censorship," according to one message from a person with 
the Twitter handle @OpBART.

Some BART board members, like Lynette Sweet, have criticized the 
decision to shut down cellphone service. "Rather than thwart 
protesters," Ms. Sweet said, "we've invited in a whole new arena of 
people that we have to deal with now. It's like relighting a fire 
that was already out."

The episode has been a sobering lesson in how even an agency that 
carries some 350,000 passengers over 104 miles of track every workday 
can be brought low by a seemingly ragtag group of activists who 
identify themselves by pseudonyms like Lamaline_5mg.

According to David Wagner, a computer science professor at the 
University of California, Berkeley, the hackers were relatively 
unsophisticated and most resembled "bored rebellious teenagers."

BART officials have labeled the protesters "cyberterrorists" and said 
the agency's actions were necessary to preserve safety in an 
environment of fast-moving trains and electrified rails.

"You have the ability to limit people's free speech when public 
safety is at risk," said the BART board president, Bob Franklin, who 
announced Thursday that the board would hold discussions this week on 
its policy for shutting off cellular communications.

But Jean Hamilton, president of a union that represents 200 BART 
employees, said the agency's leadership had mishandled the crisis. 
"We feel under fire, and we feel everything we've done to promote 
transit is in the toilet," Ms. Hamilton said. "All people are talking 
about is freedom of speech and will the trains be stopped again 
tonight."

The crisis began July 3 with a report to police dispatchers that a 
man in a tie-dyed T-shirt was walking the platform of the Civic 
Center station with an open bottle of alcohol. BART says the man, 
Charles Hill, approached officers with a four-inch-long knife and was 
preparing to throw it when an officer shot and killed him. The 
shooting is under investigation.

The incident caught the attention of the group No Justice No BART, 
which formed in response to the 2009 shooting of an unarmed man, 
Oscar Grant III, on the platform of the Fruitvale station in Oakland. 
The group has about 500 fans on Facebook. Its leader, a research 
scientist who calls himself Krystof, has clashed repeatedly with the 
BART board.

"He's shown up at our meetings - he's very cynical about BART," Mr. 
Franklin said. "He wants to disband the BART police, and he's very 
media savvy."

Krystof countered in an interview that "BART has been really insular 
- they're not used to outside scrutiny."

As the group planned for a protest on Aug. 11, BART's spokesman, 
Linton Johnson, fearing that the rally would snarl the evening 
commute, proposed cutting off cellphone and wireless service, which 
the agency controls underground. The idea was endorsed by BART police 
and authorized by BART's interim general manager, Sherwood Wakeman, a 
lawyer.

The protest never materialized, but the action provoked outrage. The 
next day, Mr. Johnson was dismissive of complaints.

"It is an amenity," he said. "We survived for years without cellphone 
service," he continued, but now people are "complaining that we 
turned it off for three hours?"

Mr. Johnson said BART approved the shutdown only after Mr. Wakeman 
determined that the action was legal under Brandenburg v. Ohio, a 
Supreme Court decision that lets the government punish speech that 
incites unlawful activity. Civil liberties advocates disagreed with 
that determination.

Ms. Sweet, the board member, said the decision "was something that 
they concocted pretty haphazardly."

Last Sunday, hackers struck a BART marketing Web site, MyBART.org, 
making public more than 2,000 passenger e-mails and passwords. The 
hackers identified themselves as part of Anonymous, an amorphous 
cyberprotest movement. In July, the F.B.I. arrested 14 people, 
including two from the Bay Area, for an Anonymous attack on PayPal.

Anonymous announced on a Web site where the information was posted 
that it had attacked BART "to show that the people will not allow you 
to kill us and censor us." It posted the group's banner, a mask of 
Guy Fawkes, the Englishman who tried to blow up the House of Lords in 
1605.

On Wednesday, BART was hacked again. After penetrating the BART 
Police Officers Association Web site, hackers posted personal 
information for 102 officers, including home addresses.

In a transcript of a private chat posted online, a person who 
identified herself with the alias Lamaline_5mg took credit for the 
attack, saying that she was annoyed "about what bart did" and that it 
was her first hacking.

An online argument ensued about whether, in fact, she was part of 
Anonymous. "Please refrain from dropping anybody's private 
information anywhere on anonymous's behalf," one poster wrote.

Lamaline 5mg responded that the lax security that had allowed her to 
penetrate the Web site was "not my fault."

The F.B.I. is investigating both hackings.

Mr. Wagner, the computer science professor, said BART could continue 
to face problems now that it appeared to have a bull's-eye on its 
back. BART's passengers also may continue suffering as the battle 
goes on. Brian Payton, of Oakland, has been delayed twice by protests 
on his way home from work in downtown San Francisco. Standing with a 
crowd waiting for the Montgomery Street BART station to open on 
Monday, Mr. Payton said it was wearing on him even though he 
sympathized with the protesters' cause.

"I do believe police brutality is wrong," he said, "but there has to 
be another way to express themselves because all they're doing is 
hurting people who had nothing to do with it."


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University