condemned<\/a> the shutdown of cell phone service as the wrong response “whether it’s halfway around the world or right here in San Francisco.”<\/p>\nAnd that pretty much sums it up. While we can appreciate that service disruptions would have been an inconvenience to passengers and employees, there’s nothing that suggests protesters were planning anything violent or beyond the course of normal civil disobedience. \u00c2\u00a0The same type of civil disobedience millions of people in North Africa and the Middle East have been fighting and dying for, and the same civil disobedience which is supposed to be protected under the First Amendment.\u00c2\u00a0Even if they were, we go back to the common sense use of technology by law enforcement and governments, which is to have officers in the same areas to ensure that protests don’t become violent or out of hand. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or killing an entire communication method because of a minority of rogue messages isn’t practical, sustainable or right.<\/p>\n
That there are no tanks or weapons involved in the latest attacks on freedom to communicate and peacefully organize doesn’t make them any less repugnant than dictators and foreign regimes using similar tactics to stifle those who want to voice legitimate grievances.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Determined to not let London be the first city to implement a Hosni Mubarak style crackdown on communication methods or devices, San Francisco transportation police suspended wireless access in stations in order to prevent protesters from organizing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6840],"tags":[6247,6249,6248,6876],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20890"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20890"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20901,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20890\/revisions\/20901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}