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Indybay Feature

OpBART Protests Censorship and Police Violence

by Liz Highleyman (liz [at] black-rose.com)
Activists came out in force at Civic Center station in San Francisco on Monday to protest BART police violence and the agency's shut-down of cellular phone service in attempt to quell a previous planned protest last week.
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Today's action -- dubbed #OpBART -- was widely announced through social media sites and the Anonymous network. Anonymous, a nebulous group of cyber-activists, hacked BART's web site over the weekend to protest the cell phone censorship. The action drew a few hundred people, though at times it appeared that media outnumbered activists (and indeed, many people filled both roles). Police ordered protesters to leave after about 20 minutes and BART closed Civic Center station. Activists then dispersed, some marching on Market Street and others protesting at other downtown BART stations. At one point BART had closed all stations between Civic Center and Embarcadero.
§OpBART protest
by Liz Highleyman
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§OpBART protest
by Liz Highleyman
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§OpBART protest
by Liz Highleyman
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§OpBART protest
by Liz Highleyman
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Media out in force
§OpBART protest
by Liz Highleyman
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§Davey D interview protester
by Liz Highleyman
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§More media
by Liz Highleyman
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§OpBART protest
by Liz Highleyman
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§Station closed
by Liz Highleyman
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Add Your Comments

Comments (Hide Comments)
techsoc Zeynep Tufekci

Next, BART will send camels and thugs to Embarcadero Station. #OpBart #MuBARTek

5 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply
by Chron's
Hey Liz, thanks for posting these. They are better than the dozens they put up on SFGate. Thanks for being there to document this action
by cp
despite some local reporting or what sfgate commenters were sayng about commute disruption, the cell blocking story got intenational and national press,discussion on npr etc.I bet this is because many journalists take 1t amendment issues seriously. Some things which were unfortunately misreported were the idea that demonstrators intended to stop the trains or block anyone (security shut the stations) including posting old photos from july on kgo, to tell this story. Also, the posting of the unencrypted filefound at mybart.org became a headline lead. instead of asking why the company didn' protect data more securely,they acted like anonymous are scary folks with suspicious levels of computer knowledge. some people seemed to be using a psyop of proclaiming that masks and anonymity are cowardly or criminal, and real protesters should suffer and offer no resistance to arrest. too bad that this tactic stopped producing results a coupl decades ago so people had to come up with new tactics
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