Contact: Harold Feld
             202-861-0020
             hfeld@publicknowledge.org

             Sherwin Siy
             202-861-0020
             ssiy@publicknowledge.org

On August 11, 2011, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), anticipating protests and demonstrations in its stations, shut down access to cellular communications, disrupted mobile phone and data service to a massive number of consumers for up to four hours.

Today, Public Knowledge, along with a coalition of other public interest organizations, listed below, urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to immediately find that BART violated federal law and to clarify that local government agencies may not interfere with access to mobile phone networks.

Gigi is out in San Diego today making a whirlwind appearance on spectrum. In addition to stopping by the FCC's workshop on mobile broadband and mobile applications (and delivering this amazing testimony here), Gigi is stopping by the International CTIA Wireless Conference to do a panel. As is often the case with these panels, they had some discussion questions to focus the group on the key issues and guide the conversation. While I expect Gigi will blog later about what actually happened, the discussion questions I saw looked pretty good to me. So I thought "hey, why not give my answers and show everyone why CTIA never invites me to speak at their conferences."

So here goes.

As I've blogged over at Tales of the Sausage Factory, my even snarkier and wonkier blog, a company called CellAntenna continues to try to leverage the problem of cell phone smuggling into prisons t expand its product line. Sadly, they keep gaining momentum, as lots of people (particularly prison wardens) would like to believe that a new tech gadget can solve their problems.