I posted this question to my Google+ contacts earlier this morning, but decided it was worth blogging about too.
The recent protests against SanFrancisco’s BART system is raising all kinds of eyebrows over a government authority’s silencing of mobile networks in the interest of public safety. The bushiest of those eyebrows: didn’t Mubarak do exactly the same thing when he was trying to silence pro-democratic riots in Egypt, and isn’t that guy in a cage on trial right now, and doesn’t this remind anyone of a certain book titled with the year Reagan was reelected? While comparing BART’s suppression of cell networks underground to Mubarak’s silencing of all Internet and telephonic communication in the entire country of Egypt is a stretch, it does follow that if citizens are content to allow a small government agency to shut off our communication systems in the name of possible threats to public safety, it would be hard for those citizens to complain about a bigger agency doing the same thing. It sets a dangerous precedent.
The people of SanFrancisco had the right to protest BART’s action, and protest they did. The hacker group Anonymous even got in on the action, showing up, as they did in DC recently, wearing Guy Fawkes masks and joined in the fun of shutting down the metro stations around downtown SFO.
The eyebrow I raised after reading the Times’s report (linked above) about the protests, was Anonymous’s hacking of myBART.org, a “web site for BART riders,” wherein they “leaked the names, phone numbers and passwords of many of the site’s users.” What’s puzzling to me about this, is why a friend of the cause would intentionally do harm to its own people.
Yes what BART did was wrong. Yes anonymous have the right to protest; I’m even inclined to say they have the right to hack the myBART website as a means of protest. But how effective a protest is it to release data of innocent civilians? It seems the worst kinds of protests are the ones where the leaders intentionally put the supporters at greater risk. For example, if my bank came under fire and someone hacked the bank and released my account numbers, address, user name and password, it would be hard to think, “those dudes are on my side.”
Then again, maybe compromised data is the new risk of protesting; the 21st equivalent of getting arrested for sitting at a lunch counter. That would be like MLK arresting the people for the police, or directing the fire hoses. Most people knew it was a possibility going into the protests, but in the civil rights movement, when people were arrested it reinforced the movement’s legitimacy.
A while ago I railed against Malcolm Gladwell’s argument that social movements require “huge sacrifices” in order to be successful, and that the lack of sacrifices in online social movements is proof that “the revolution will not be tweeted.” Is this the “huge sacrifice” people will be required to make, that if you protest you risk having any data connected to the institution you are protesting against compromised? Weigh in, share your thoughts in the comments.
Fantastic inquiries, Greg, and intriguing questions I think. In answer to your final question I would say that yes, the possibility of essential data being outed is a sacrifice people need to be aware of and willing to make when they opt into any kind of system, be it a bank, transit system, etc. It’s unfortunate that a certain amount of opting in is pretty much essential in today’s world, ie one must have a social security number that is used as identification in any number of situations if you want to live any way other than completely off the grid. No one should be deluded that participation in the public sphere is inherently safe, at least in regards to the lockdown of shared information. I think the American public has been sorely misled as to the nature of the information web in the present age, and education on conscious consumption and conveyance of information is essential.
However, I think it is also up to the public to hold protesters like Anonymous accountable to exactly what you criticize: releasing date of innocent civilians. I would challenge those innocent civilians to demand that hackers and protesters alike explain the intention and benefit behind releasing that kind of information to the world.
~Lauren
It would seem like a much more effective thing to do would be to hack in and just delete all the data. That would set BART even further back, forcing them to have all their customers reenter all their data and possibly rebuild parts of their website.
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