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Traffic & Transit
A protest at Powell Street BART station Thursday evening led to dozens of arrests and delayed commuters attempting to ride BART.
BART Police in riot gear lined the entrances to the station at approximately 5:30 p.m., denying entrance to the subterranean courtyard and entrance gates of Powell Street station. More than 30 people were detained, including up to a dozen journalists, the Beat has learned.
BART’s decision to shut down cell phone service in its downtown San Francisco stations August 11 in order to disrupt a planned protest has drawn howls of outrage from civil libertarians and many riders.
The American Civil Liberties Union called the move “glaringly small-minded” and “dangerous to democracy.” San Francisco mayoral candidates Phil Ting and Leland Yee were among those who joined the chorus of condemnation.
But was the move actually unconstitutional, as many say it is? Probably not, according to California Beat legal analyst Preston Thomas.
The international group of hackers known as “Anonymous” continued to target the Bay Area Rapid Transit District Wednesday, hacking the agency’s Police Officers Association website and leaking the names, addresses and contact information for 102 BART police officers.
The leaked information included e-mail addresses and passwords for the affected transit police officers, according to a list posted online this morning. The leak was the second such hack of a BART-related website and unauthorized release of personal information in the past week.
A peaceful crowd of demonstrators disrupted the evening commute Monday, leading police through Downtown San Francisco and leading to the roving closures of all four underground BART and MUNI Metro Stations at the height of commute hour.
Thousands of transit patrons experienced delays of hours after a planned 5 p.m. protest at the Civic Center BART Station spilled out to other stations on Market Street, causing closures that lasted upwards of 90 minutes.
An international group of hackers carried out an attack against the Bay Area Rapid Transit District’s online infrastructure Sunday, leaking thousand of user names, addresses, phone numbers and log-in passwords belonging to subscribers of the website myBART.org.
Hackers claiming to be affiliated with the organization “Anonymous” infiltrated the website Sunday morning, replacing images with their main calling card — the mask worn by the main character in the film “V for Vendetta.” The hackers also rewrote text on the website, calling attention to their protest against the transit agency’s controversial decision to sever mobile phone access to prevent a planned protest last week.
Bay Area Rapid Transit District officials found themselves defending a decision to temporarily disable underground wireless communications to mobile phone users in the Downtown San Francisco subway Thursday afternoon to heed off potential protests organized by anti-BART Police groups angry over the fatal officer-involved shooting of a transient at the Civic Center Station.
Civil liberties groups, advocates for free speech, and BART riders likened the maneuver to tactics used by Middle Eastern dictators like Hosni Mubarak, who attempted to stifle citizen uprisings earlier this year by cutting off access to voice, text and internet communications.
UPDATE 2005 PDT: The Powell Street Station has reopened to passengers.
UPDATE 1934 PDT: 16th Street/ Mission and Civic Center stations have fully reopened to passengers.
UPDATE 1914 PDT: BART is beginning to shut down the Powell Street Station after protesters arrive at the transit stop. The Civic Center Station has reopened to allow passengers to off-board trains. Passengers may disembark trains at Powell, but BART is not allowing passengers to enter the station.
UPDATE 1835 PDT: BART has just shut down the 16th Street/ Mission Station after demonstrators moved their protest there.
(6/25) — 2229 PDT — LOVELOCK, Nev. — Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board said 28 people on board an Emeryville-bound Amtrak train were still unaccounted for after a semi-truck collided with several train cars Friday afternoon.
Six people were killed in the fiery accident, authorities said.
A United Airlines flight bound for Kansai, Japan returned to San Francisco International Airport Friday evening after a passenger suffered a medical emergency mid-flight.
United Airlines Flight 885 departed SFO shortly before noon when the Boeing 777 made an unexpected U-turn over the Pacific Ocean 2.5 hours into the trip after the passenger fell ill.
(6/17) — UPDATE 2241 PDT — SAN FRANCISCO — A “computer outage” forced United Airlines to delay or cancel hundreds of flights system wide for hours Friday evening, stranding tens of thousands of travelers from coast-to-coast.
The airline’s computer system slowly came back online by 10 p.m., nearly 5 hours after the outage grounded most of its departures.
