There are plenty of means of emergency communication in the trains and on platforms.
That deals with heart attacks. Calling home to check on kids is not an emergency. We managed before cellphones, and BART is not obligated to furnish emergency recharging stations to deal with people who want to do this whose cellphones have died.
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
Let me ask you this, tho, xtisme: what law permits BART to shut down a private company’s equipment?
[/QUOTE]
If they shut down some vendors cell repeaters then my guess is that they will be liable for a suit from the vendor…though maybe not, since ‘public safety’ is like the magic phrase that lets the government do all sorts of stuff. That would be if Sprint et al had put in the cell cites and infrastructure to support them. If, as I suspect, BART had put in cell repeaters connected to their own infrastructure then it would be like any other CPE…they could shut it down at will, and the most that would happen is that their customers (and the vendor) would be annoyed.
They probably can, as the government has some fairly broad powers wrt ‘public safety’…our fire/rescue departments certainly swing that around like a dead cat whenever the subject comes up. My guess is that fire/rescue/police could shut down cell towers if they could demonstrate that it was indeed a ‘public safety’ issue…and they probably WOULD shut it down and then count on skating afterward using that as their justification. In fact I’ve seen something similar happen, though I’m not going to go into the details here.
That said though, I don’t believe (key word since I actually don’t know the details…my entire argument in this thread is based on the assumption of how these repeaters are hooked up and how they were deployed wrt whether it was done at the vendors request or at BART’s request. It might seem trivial but it makes a big difference IMHO) that this is the case here. If someone has hard data that the repeaters were vendor equipment using vendor infrastructure, then that would change my own attitude here. In that case, I STILL think that BART could do what they did, but I think that it’s much more invasive and serious for a government agency to operate this way.
My guess (sort of a WAG, but based on how we operate cell repeaters in some of our buildings) is that BART basically brought in the repeaters and hooked them up to their own infrastructure because of poor cell coverage in their tunnels and terminals. They could have worked out some sort of deal with the vendors…give us the repeaters and we’ll put them on our system, then your customers will be able to use their phones when they are on our premises. No real expectation of service (i.e. no formal SLA), but just an extension of your existing service as a bonus for our customers…everyone is happy and you don’t have to put in a bunch of infrastructure (or get a bunch of permits) to do it. What’s not to like?
Assuming that’s the case, BART is under no obligation to have those repeaters up, and the vendor is under no SLA to ensure uptime either. If BART chooses to shut them down, it would be the equivalent of shutting down their ISP connection to the internet if they were offering WiFi…bummer for the customers using their internet as a free service, but neither the ISP vendor nor the customers should have any expectations of that service…it’s an extra bonus offered by BART. That’s how it works at the facilities I’m involved in anyway.
-XT
Thanks for the answers, xt. FWIW, I’m in general agreement with you on this. I do wish we had more specific information, tho, as I think the devil is in the details (as it almost always is).
It’s hard to argue about whether or not this specific instance is right or wrong, good or bad, tastes great or is less filling, without knowing specifically who’s equipment it was, in particular.
This is all I’m going to quote, but not because it’s all I’m responding to. I just think for the most part the stuff you’re talking about is beside my point, and that you’re kind of ignoring the distinction. Like you said, you’re talking about this from a services perspective, but I’m not. Anyway, I didn’t say they are obligated to forward signals, period, not even in the part you quoted, and I think the difference is the point. I said that - unlike Starbucks - once they started forwarding signals voluntarily, they were subject to the First Amendment in the way that they did so in the future, and if discontinuing it was an infringement of somebody’s First Amendment rights, then that’s a problem. They’re obligated not to discriminate. The law that prevents them from cutting off communications for the wrong reasons is the First Amendment, the due process clause of the 14th, and Gitlow v. New York.
Those don’t apply to Starbucks. It’s confusing to me that you’re hearing what I’m saying, and still discussing SLAs and your buildings and how you (probably not a government entity), a coffee shop, and the elected public officials who make up BART are all in the same boat. You aren’t in the same boat, because they’re the government and you’re not. In constitutional terms, there literally could not be a bigger difference, but you’re kind of shrugging at it.
The answer to your question about what’s the difference, where does the obligation come from is the First Amendment: the government can’t fuck with people’s right to communicate with each other without very good reason and very careful action. Allowing people a public space to express themselves and then taking it away for an arbitrary or discriminatory reason can be just as much a violation of their rights as actively preventing them from expressing themselves, because it has the same effect. And just to reiterate, this isn’t like a one-step process where BART had to have been wrong just because it’s a First Amendment question. It can be a First Amendment question that comes down one way or the other. But it is a question.
Governments close or restrict access to communications and forums they have created pretty much all the time. Is there any serious body of case law that has found these actions violate the First Amendment?
When the internet first started to come out, at least around here, libraries just started hooking up computers and letting people log on and do whatever they wanted.
There was no Web Sense, porn filtering, no audit tracking of who was logged on etc.
The first move I started to see was filtering of adult sites and things like that. Eventually I started to see login required (usually the system would take your library card # as your login ID) so that there is a full audit trail of what’s going on with that computer, because before that people would do illegal shit on public computers since it could not easily be tracked back to a single person.
Have any successful suits ever been brought against libraries for taking these actions?
Many libraries have space for groups to meet in as a public service. I imagine sometimes libraries have to remodel and sometimes these meeting rooms may be reduced in number or capacity, as the library administration saw fit to do, has there been a successful suit that this is a violation of patrons First Amendment rights?
These scenarios all involve restriction or elimination of forums as part of the needs of operating a library. Given the fact that “public safety” and “safe transportation of passengers” are probably considered more important a function of BART than “providing a forum” I would be very surprised if it was perfectly okay for a library to reduce or eliminate “forums” for operating reasons but a violation of constitutional rights for BART to do so as part of safely performing its core duty to the public.
Sorry, just a driveby here between flights, but wanted to quickly address a couple of things:
[QUOTE=Jimmy Chitwood]
Those don’t apply to Starbucks. It’s confusing to me that you’re hearing what I’m saying, and still discussing SLAs and your buildings and how you (probably not a government entity), a coffee shop, and the elected public officials who make up BART are all in the same boat. You aren’t in the same boat, because they’re the government and you’re not. In constitutional terms, there literally could not be a bigger difference, but you’re kind of shrugging at it.
[/QUOTE]
Why am I not in the same boat? I work for the State of New Mexico as a state employee. Our facilities are state facilities…i.e. we are the government, if not the Federal government. We still ‘count’ however.
I don’t see the difference, so could you elaborate as to what you think it is? Is it because I’m not an elected official, but instead an appointed state employee? Or did you not understand that I DO work for the government, and the facilities I manage are state facilities, with services to the public?
I completely disagree with this on many levels. The biggest one being, as I’ve said in this thread repeatedly, that the government is under no obligation to forward private communications from private carriers to the public. That they do so is a service, not a right. Even if the government cut off the actual cell towers, which I’ve seen happen, they can do so in the name of ‘pubic service’, though the carrier (not the public) could and possibly would take legal action after the fact.
Do you have any evidence or cites showing a precedent for the government cutting off WiFi or forwarded cell service where some party (the public, the carrier, anyone) was able to bring legal action against the government for doing so? To me that would be extraordinary, and I’d be very interested in seeing the details, since it would directly impact our own operations…since, as I’ve said, I DO work for ‘the government’ and we DO provide those services to the public…and we have and probably will in the future cut them off or have them go down for various reasons. Or for no reason at all, other than I or my boss, or some official above my boss, decided to shut them down.
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
Thanks for the answers, xt. FWIW, I’m in general agreement with you on this. I do wish we had more specific information, tho, as I think the devil is in the details (as it almost always is).
[/QUOTE]
No worries SBB. I would love to see some additional details on this. I’m going to be home a lot of next week and if I come across anything I’ll definitely post it…or if anyone else has additional details that would be great. The devil here, I think, IS in the details of exactly how this was set up. That said, the government actually has fairly broad powers when something like ‘public safety’ (which is a magic button sometimes) is impacted. I’d be pretty outraged if BART shut off the vendors equipment or towers that were fully operated by the various cell carriers, though I could see how they COULD do that, if a decision was made that this was a ‘public safety’ issue. It doesn’t even get to the yawn point if this was stuff that BART brought in and riding on their infrastructure, however, and short of JC coming up with some cites of precedence of the law I’d say that there is no case for infringement of the right to free speech here (the caveat being I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internet…I’m a network engineer and administrator, in charge of infrastructure).
It is…I’m just giving my take, based on my own experiences here. The devil is going to be in the details.
-XT
I just think they didn’t want a bunch of clueless angry hippies (rife in SF) screwing things up for everyone else because of some perceived slight. Help, help; I’m being oppressed! :rolleyes: