Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Want Public Safety? Don't Disable Cell Phones
In response to outrage over last week's shutdown of cell phone service in four San Francisco stations on rumors of a planned protest, BART officials have repeatedly claimed their decision was necessary to maintain public safety. BART spokesman Linton Johnson has gone so far as to invent a new Constitutional “right to safety” which trumps the First Amendment. As it happens, we are in full agreement that BART has an obligation to the safety of its passengers. We believe that working cell phones throughout the BART system do not pose a danger to riders; rather, they help to promote public safety.
Furthermore, BART riders agree with us, and if you go back to 2001, BART officials do too. BART made the decision to introduce cell phone service to trains and platforms shortly after 9/11, in response to popular demand from BART riders who saw that New Yorkers had found cell phones to be invaluable to communicating with authorities and loved ones in the midst of city-wide confusion.
And safety isn’t just about emergency situations. Every day, we rely on mobile technology to communicate for peace of mind—such as when a parent uses a cell phone to alert a babysitter that rush hour delays will prevent the timely pick up of a child.
EFF voiced its strong support for widespread availability of cell phone and wifi service in our comments to the FCC about the proposed Next Generation 911 system earlier this year:
Communications technology has made us steadily safer and safer for over
a century by making it ever cheaper and faster to tell people who can
help about problems in a timely way. The 911 system is a great triumph
that represents an important piece of this puzzle, but another piece is
simply making communications cheaper, more reliable, and more
ubiquitous. Even communications channels that cannot contact 911
services at all aid public safety by increasing the chance that someone
who can help will find out about a problem promptly.
By framing this issue as a decision between communication and safety, BART officials have presented a false choice. As one BART rider commented in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Haven’t we learned from the World Trade Center attacks that communication in any situation is necessary?”
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
12 Comments so far
Show AllI love your picture darling.
I also agree with your entire opinion on cell phone censorship. I IS a sign of totalitarianism writ large but most people will just ho hum and change channels.
This is sad what is going on in America.
Hey Bubba, put down the beer, turn off the TV and wake up. You are in the cross hairs and no amount of denial can change the facts.
"Safety" is code. It's the constant excuse for the theft of freedom.
"Safety" is the smiling, or at least benevolent, obverse side of the "security" coin.
The reverse side is "authoritarian control", aka "law & order"-- the cold, clenched mailed fist that gives shape and brute force to the fuzzy, warm velvet glove of "safety".
Safety was the original reason for the offending protest. It's just not safe when uniformed yahoos with guns are shooting people down in the public space. Not safe at all.
When BART (the government) has control of the means of communication (cell-phone towers), why isn't the shutting down of the means of communication a prior restraint?Straight question. Anybody?
Anybody interested...here's a discussion
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/08/20/bart%e2%80%99s-protest-position-does-not-withstand-legal-scrutiny/
Two edged sword, that.
Cell phones have become both a means to ensure public safety (you can call 911 from pretty much anywhere), and a means by which to destroy public safety (a flash mob recently took down a 911 call center).
Technology is neither good nor bad, it is neutral, a tool to either be used well or badly, as such it is certainly open to regulation.
After reading through several comments threads to stories about the BART contretemps and the role of high-tech communications devices and social media in furthering social change/revolution, I am reminded of one of Homer Simpson's classic pronouncements:
"To alcohol! The cause of-- and solution to-- all of life's problems."
So too with cell phones and Internet-based social media.
Just off the top of my head: I do agree with the author's common-sense observation that cell phones can be a "invaluable to communicating with authorities and loved ones" during crises-- whether they're large-scale catastrophic emergencies, or personal mishaps like becoming lost, ill, or otherwise discommoded, endangered, or incapacitated while traveling in some isolated area, etc.
So in that sense, cell phones are undeniably a "godsend", QED.
OTOH, cell phones and especially "smart phones" are also useful to a "Homeland Security" surveillance apparatus. And the increasing social and commercial imperative to own and use cell phones and participate in social media sites is not without drawbacks and perils.
To resurrect an almost prehistoric mass-media marketing slogan, raising cell-phone ownership and usage to the level of necessity, even compulsion, reinforces a kind of blind or uncritical consumerism distantly but distinctly related to the petulant slogan "I want my MTV!"
All this to say that at best it's a mixed and dubious blessing. There's no justification for top-down governmental or corporate repression and censorship that unduly limits access to communications networks to serve authoritarian ends.
But as we zealously advocate the "right to cell-phone access" to counter bogus and preposterous authoritarian assertions of a "Constitutional right to safety", it's unwise to deny or ignore the extent to which this right also exposes us to pernicious dependencies and vulnerabilities.
Personally, I despise the damned things, and won’t have one. Do I really want everybody to be able to get ahold of me 24/7? God no. I like to disappear; it’s necessary to my sanity, or what’s left of it. And I certainly don’t want Homeland Security to be capable of tracking me—not that I’m doing anything subversive, but I am definitely guilty of numerous thoughtcrimes. These days, thinking at all seems to be an act of subversion.
I also despise how they have redefined public space. Nobody’s quite where they are anymore. They’re on the phone—it never ceases to amaze me how much time people spend yakking on their phone, even texting while they’re driving. Don’t they ever take time to talk to the people around them anymore, or even, heaven forbid, spend some time in silent contemplation? And what are they talking about? Their haircuts, what they want to buy at the mall, what’s for dinner? I mean, I don’t know a whole lot of people that have discussions worth their breath.
Boy, am I in a lousy mood today.
By the way, Obedient Servant, I did go back and look at your reply to my comment on the other day’s Harrington article. Agreed.
Before there were cell phones, there were pagers.
I used to make the rounds of fifteen or so "field offices" when I was on the state unemployment insurance agency's regional staff; there were always one or two guys in each office-- never women, as far as I recall-- who conspicuously wore these pagers clipped to their belts.
These were invariably line interviewers, not supervisors-- the pagers weren't work-related. They seemed to convey a vague air of importance.
I don't know-- maybe they were organ transplant candidates who urgently needed to know when one was available.
FWIW, I finally broke down and got a cellphone in 2005 because of a personal crisis of sorts. I frankly waste money keeping the service, because I seldom turn it on and rarely use it; in fact, I generally use it only when I'm traveling to a family rendezvous, because my sister feels better if I'm available in case of some logistical snafu.
BTW, if you haven't read it I recommend "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World, or Six Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door" by Lynne Truss. I found it thoughtful and hilarious, not necessarily in that order.
Truss is-- very much unfortunately, IMO-- marketed and publicized as a "Miss Manners"-type curmudgeonly fusspot and grammar nanny. If I hadn't read her books first, I probably would've been put off by the way she's presented. It's trivializing at best.
Yep shut down communications but it was ok to take loaded Firearms to Obama Healthcare Town Hall Meetings. Officials talk of our liberties, but then put restrictions every step of the way. Americans and people of the world better make a decision. So what if FB or Twitter communicate protest or gatherings or whatever. With Communications Black out disrupting Cell phones is more dangerous. Do you want Freedom or Restrictions in our lives to make us feel safter when in fact you will be buying into "False Security" which is worse than no Security.