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The story, which started as a group of people willing to protest, has somehow turned into all out war over censorship. After Anonymous made some threats, they appear to make good on them, since BART was soon targeted.
The story involving US subway cell phone service provider BART and censorship started with the death of a knife-wielding by the police gun fire. This event inspired the desire of some people to protest at one of the San Francisco subway stations. However, once BART knew about the potential protest, the company simply cut all cell phone services at 4 subway stations in order to avert the protest.
The news about this turn of event spread like wildfire. Unsurprisingly, it caused outrage amongst many, including the ACLU and the EFF. One of the hacker groups, Anonymous, joined a fierce debate over censorship and safety and promised to “remove” the company from the web in retaliation against what can be clearly called censorship. Although the hacktivists only threatened to take the site offline for six hours, it now appears that the database of the website was also compromised and later dumped for all to view.
Anonymous issued the statement when dumping the database, saying that US citizens would not tolerate oppression from the government and its bodies and agencies. As for BART, it has proved many times it exploited and abused the people. Hackers claim that it is displayed by the recent killings by BART police that made killings acceptable while using non-lethal weapons in the incidents. The next step was taken when the police violated the human right of everyone to assembly and prevented other people from using emergency services, as all the cell phone signals were block in a controversial attempt to stop a protest against the police murders. Finally, BART set up their official website to store their members’ data virtually insecure. Indeed, the information, including passwords, wasn’t encrypted and stored in such way that it could be easily obtainable by everyone having an Internet connection. In other words, all this shows how BART cares about the people of the United States.
Anonymous reminded the government that if it was becoming tyrannical and oppressive,
its people would be responding and fight with protests, riots, and in this case – hacking. In the meantime, hacker group brought their apologies to any citizen having their data published because of BART failing to secure it.
