Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

San Francisco’s BART Subway Defends Protest-Stifling Cellphone Shutdown

Authorities said they shut down cellphone service on parts of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit on Thursday night to stifle a planned protest on the subway system. A BART statement defended the move “as one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately described the move as a “Mubarak”; others noted the parallels with the United Kingdom’s proposal to limit phone and social media services in the wake of that country’s riots.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald