Anonymous takes on Bay Area transit system

HACKERS WITH A CONSCIENCE Anonymous have set their sights on the US Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Fransisco after it shut down cell phone services in expectation of a local protest.

The hackers pre-warned the transit system about the protests, which it said was started in response to behaviour not unlike that seen by less than savoury governments during the Arab Spring revolutions.

"TO THE PEOPLE OF THE USA: The past year has brought about some substantial awareness through some unfortunate events that have occurred throughout our world. From internet censorship to the unnecessary violence inflicted upon unarmed civilans, we've all seen what can happen once a portion of us are gagged," it said.

"In Egypt and Tunisia, we saw people struggling to make their voices heard. We have seen companies such as Telecomix delve into the nastiness of political corruption in an attempt to free those censored individuals from their prisons of silence. Today, we've seen America come alive. In the Bay Area, we've seen people gagged, and once more, Anonymous will attempt to show those engaging in the censorship what it feels like to be silenced."

Operation BART, or #OpBART to use its Twitter hashtag, is meant to teach Bart a lesson about the dangers of censoring people, it added, and is supposed to be an educational experience for the operators.

"#OpBART is an operation geared toward balance - toward learning. You do not censor people because they wish to speak out against the wrongs the wrongful things occurring around them," it added in its statement.

"The Bay Area Rapid Transit has made the conscious decision of ordering various cell phone companies to terminate services for the downtown area inhibiting those in the area from using cell phones - even in the case of an emergency."

A full protest is expected to happen in San Fransisco later today but for now the group, or parts of it, are 'warming up'.

Part of this warm up are nuisance attacks like the one that took the usual BART web site offline this weekend. "Operation BART is getting warmed up. Today Anonymous defaced BART affiliated websites and released user info for the website mybart.org," reads a post on the OpBART Facebook account from this weekend. that introduces the myBART web site hack.

Around 9000 people are expected to attend the peaceful protest later today. µ