15 August 2011 – By Damon Baldini
This evening, members of Anonymous and other citizens of the Bay Area engaged in a peaceful and non-violent protest of BART system. The BART police department has come under heavy scrutiny for abusive police practices that resulted in the death of Charles Hill on July 3rd 2011. BART also made a decision to shut down all cell communications at its stations in order to stave off a potential earlier protest, only to have an actual protest take place as a result.
Protesters began to gather at the Civic Center station just before the 5pm scheduled protest time. BART PD and the BART control center responded by closing the station and ordering trains to move through without discharging or accepting new passengers. As the protesters made there way down the line toward the Embarcadero, BART police closed stations in order to minimize risk to protestors and passengers. Only 4 stations were affected by the protesters actions.
Social media played a big role in the coordination of the protest as many Anonymous operatives were monitoring the BART PD radio traffic. CYBERWAR_NEWS also monitored the BART PD feed and kept a continuous #OpsBART twitter feed on our website in order to keep the public and protesters informed of current events. The protest continued peacefully and non-violent despite attempts by some "trolls" to incite riots by tweeting false field reports. The trolls used the Twitter tag @LuLzOps but it was not clear if they were actually affiliated with LulzSec. Those reports were quickly dismissed by reports from the field and from intel gathered from the BART PD radio feeds.
The protest lasted approximately 2 hours and ended at the Embarcadero. SF PD lent about 100 officers to assist in keeping the peace. There appears to have been minimal disruption to the evening commute and both sides are calling their actions during the protest a success.
Video of the protest can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/3g54bdp
View complete blog here: CYBERWAR_NEWS
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