It now appears that the Federal Communications Commission is looking into the San Francisco trance agency for blocking the aforementioned cellphone service. FCC spokesman Neil Grace told The Hill:

“Any time communications services are interrupted, we seek to assess the situation … we are continuing to collect information about BART’s actions and will be taking steps to hear from stakeholders about the important issues those actions raised, including protecting public safety and ensuring the availability of communications networks.”

Numerous people began questioning the legality of the shutdown, as most saw it as a violation of the First Amendment. The hacktivist group Anonymous also disagreed with BART’s methods, and proceeded to deface the website, and even released the user info database from MyBart.gov.

Yesterday BART authorities prepped for another surge of protests after Anonymous called for a real-lfe protest on Monday night. Using Twitter hashtags such as #BartOp and #MuBARTak (a reference to the former Egyptian leader who killed telephone and Internet access in the country).

It should be noted that no arrests were made during the protests and cellphone service was functional during the protest.

[Lead image courtesy]

Dallas, Las Vegas, California’s Humboldt County and Thousand Oaks, and the San Francisco Bay Area have been included in the update.  They’re all quite some distance from Lexington, Kentucky (the home of WebProNews), but, well, whatever.  People in those locations should be pleased, anyway.

Chris Harrelson, a Google Transit software engineer, is also happy.  “As you may know, Google Transit began its life as a 20 percent project,” he wrote on the Google LatLong Blog.  “Now, the fine folks at BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] have furthered their collaboration with us in BART 1 percent time which is like 20 percent time, only, as our friends at BART explain, ‘it’s one person and 19 percent less time.’”

And if you’re interested in seeing the results of this effort, Harrelson continued, “This data is available for anyone who wants to access it in the Google Transit Feed Specification, a creative commons-licensed data format we’ve developed to help facilitate sharing of data within the transit community.”

That technology (and the fact that the project doesn’t depend on a fleet of camera cars) should help Google Transit continue to spread.

Other movie industry-focused blogs try to delve deeper into the soft white underbelly of Hollywood, and race to the Internet with what they find. As to how well they do this, Bart and a couple of noteworthy blogs disagree.

“While the blogosphere has its share of heroes, it’s also populated by pseudo-journalists who have never done a fact check or apologized to a public figure whose career may have been damaged by their bizarre rants,” Bart said of bloggers. “They pose a challenge to the gatekeepers and the high priests of publicity who must figure out how to deal with them.”

Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net called Bart’s article “full of lies about publication dates that they break themselves,” and suggested Bart’s rant stems from Variety running out of steam.

“Don’t scrap the rules entirely, but adapt them to fit into this new world,” said Billington. “Press has changed, and it no longer allows for months of publication time and extensive fact checking. Grant access to everyone, don’t be so restrictive to only

The electric rail.

It’s not lost on me that when I worked at Microsoft there were a few issues that people would tell me not to touch cause they’d cause trouble for me. How did that get communicated to me? “That’s an electric rail.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that electric rail metaphor today and why I am giving HP such harsh treatment. Privacy is an electric rail.

Let me explain. Big companies rely on our private data to make money. Verizon knows where and when I use my cell phone so it can charge me. At Microsoft if you attended the PDC you had to put your name and address and credit card number into the system so we could charge you and get you your ticket. At health care organizations they know even more detailed private information. And so on and so forth. Big companies have a lot of our data locked up in their data centers.

So, why did I care that HP’s board of directors pushed the boundary of where private information could be used? Because private data must be held sacrosanct. Private data is an electric rail. Use it properly and it will power your business. Use it improperly and you should get fired. There’s no other way to put it. It should be that clear. It IS an electric rail.

This is why I’m giving HP’s board of directors such a hard time (and will continue to do so). They touched the electric rail. You just can’t do that without severe consequences.

Note: the electric rail doesn’t care if you have a reason to touch it. You touch it, you pay severe consequences. Why does that need to be true? So no other company thinks of touching it in the future.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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