Some of the message boards I read regularly are up in arms about the fact that the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut down its underground cell service, making it harder for coordination by the protestors about the killing of a knife wielding man by BART police. This is the first time in the US that a government agency blacked out service, and stands in contrast to our supporting anti blocking systems during many of the Arab Spring revolts.

Of course for the positive, the nature of regimes change (change we can live with), but there are changes we shouldn’t live with. The recent riots in London have been very apolitical in nature with no demographic being truly represented and with much of the looting being posted on Facebook (News - Alert).

However, a phone does not know if you are a rebel with a cause or a human displaying flaws, so the question of is it acceptable to turn off service must be asked. 

And it should be asked with an eye to the implications for business as well. If I, as a shop owner, used video surveillance that transmitted pictures via cellular, I like the looters would be blind.

The Supreme Court looked at these issues during World War I (no, I am not that old). Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed to the issue of yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. In two separate cases they made seemingly opposite decisions. IMHO opinion there was a distinction being made between free speech for the individual versus the potential for public panic. The case of a legitimate crowded theater made the court opt for repressing free speech if there was no fire.

To be clear I have no idea of the nature of the people who were trying to organize the protest in San Francisco. I am not sure if they were legitimate protestors or potential looters like those in London.

I do know that the use of the antenna shut down, benefitted from it being a closed area. Assuming they had surveillance hooked up to fiber, the concern about victims not being able to make contact may be moot.   

However in other scenarios where sensor nets and public wireless networks are widespread, I can see concerns in the solution being jamming or blocking of the network. 

It maybe that over time Class of Services [CoS] will support a scalpel of outages rather than blanket blocking. We have lots of ways to enable blocking besides taking down the antennas.

Talking with David Williams, the CTO of Stoke (News - Alert), about Enhanced Package Data Gateways and the use of WiFi as a backup transport for 4G networks was a big discussion. Many carriers are seeing opportunity to manage their traffic offload via the smartphone using third party WiFi (News - Alert) networks that are tunneled back to the carrier. Carriers could move M2M traffic on its own CoS that is prioritized over these systems.

However, could and should don’t always match. Turning off the networks, or even a portion, may lose evidence. In the UK right now the facial recognition system (AKA Facebook) is being used to track the looters. 

For M2M, I think the carriers need to prove the ability to support, secure and survive sensor traffic under any circumstance. 

After all you never know if your sensor will be in the next crowded theater.

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