“Officials were concerned that the protestors ‘would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of…police.’”
“Cutting off [municipal provided] cellphone service for… several hours was ‘one of the many tactics used to ensure the safety of everyone…’”
Parts of a story from China? Or the Middle East? Maybe North Korea? No, in fact this is a story from the U.S., from San Francisco, a place of supposed staunch civil liberties, a story of a municipal communications system being shut down specifically to prevent certain people from engaging in specific and legal communications. That, in part, is why it is so chilling.
Officials got directly to the point, “Cellphone users may not have liked being incommunicado, but BART officials told the SF Appeal, an online paper, that it was well within its rights. After all, since it pays for the cell service underground, it can cut it off.”
Whether San Francisco should be paying for municipal communications systems at all is a question for another day, particularly when the city has unrestricted budget funds of just 1 percent of general revenues, and the third highest unfunded pension liability ($34,940 per household) in the nation, soon exceeding the cost of its police force. The more pressing concern is one first raised by IPI in 2004—the freedom of speech problems that arise when a municipality owns a communications system.
A common argument from those who support and prefer government-built communications systems is that they simply trust government more than “big corporations” to protect their interests. We have pointed out again and again that any entity, regardless of how it is organized, that uses its power to restrict our constitutional freedoms should be anathema to all. Unfortunately, we again have an example of the use of power to stop speech—not stop actions, but speech.
If this had been a company, then law enforcement, courts and regulatory bodies would act as a monitor; but in this case government retorts that it owns the system and may do as it wants.
Much of the country baked under a summer sun this year, but as we head into fall this is a chill wind that we don’t want.
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Today's Techbyte was written by Bartlett D. Cleland, Policy Counsel with the Institute for Policy Innovation.
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