Today, Public Knowledge, joined by a wide variety of consumer, civil rights, and civil liberties groups, urged the FCC to immediately pass rules that would prevent local authorities from ordering a shutdown of wireless services the way that BART did earlier this month. As Harold’s earlier blog post points out, we don’t even need to get to the (extremely pressing and important) First Amendment issues to find that BART’s actions violated the law—the Communications Act, to be precise.

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.

The Associated Press brings us the news that both house of Congress have passed parallel bills to ban the use of cell phones and other wireless devices in federal prisons. The bill, S. 1749, was introduced to curb the illicit use of cell phones within prisons to conduct criminal business from inside prisons.

This solution stands in stark contrast to one that had been shopped around not too long ago by vendors of cell blocking tech, where prisons would install jammers to block cellular signals in and around prisons. Fortunately, instead of trotting out a technological solution (with its concomitant negative effects on legitimate users) to what is a broader problem, this bill attempts to address the problem by using tools already in place within the system.

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.

A day in advance of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on legislation (S. 251) to allow interference with cellular phones in prisons, nine public interest groups and consumer organizations told the Committee in a July 14 letter that the legislation would cause more serious problems than it would solve.