Cell Phones Stay On, but Protesters Disrupt San Francisco Subway

San Francisco- The busy evening commute out of downtown San Francisco gave way Monday to a chaotic cat-and-mouse game between police officers and roving protesters who lashed out at the transit agency for temporarily shutting down underground cellular phone service last week.


BART closed all four downtown San Francisco stations - Civic Center, Powell, Montgomery and Embarcadero - soon after the protest began at 5 p.m. Officers in riot gear blocked entrances as many train riders fumed on the sidewalks and tried to figure out how to get home. All stations were reopened by 7:30 p.m.


Muni Metro stations at the same locations were closed in tandem with the BART stations.


BART's action last Thursday - which ignited an international debate about technology, free speech and public safety - was an effort to diffuse an antipolice demonstration. But it spurred an even larger protest Monday that was organized online by a loose-knit band of computer hackers known as Anonymous.


The protests attracted national attention after BART shut down its underground mobile bay stations, operated by five wireless carriers, last Thursday in hopes of disrupting communication between participants during an earlier protest.


Monday's protesters, many of them wearing the Guy Fawkes masks favored by Anonymous, compared BART to former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who cut off cellphone and Internet services in the country when faced with street demonstrations in Cairo.


BART was roundly condemned for last week's cell phone cutoff. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a "shameful attack on free speech." On Monday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said it was looking into the incident.


This time around, BART left mobile services alone, but its station closures left crowds of commuters milling around station entrances waiting for the protest to move on so they could get on their way home. BART carries about 350,000 Bay Area commuters each workday.


Antonio McFarlane, a systems integrator who works in San Francisco, had been waiting for half an hour for BART's Embarcadero station to open up and take him home to Oakland. He said he had some sympathy for both BART and the protesters, but shutting down mobile service in a tech savvy city such as San Francisco was a no-no, he said. "If you mess with technology, it's a big deal.