Linton Johnson still MIA

Oh brotha, where art thou?

Linton Johnson, the all-purpose public voice of BART, remains on leave more than a month since his public relations war with protesters put him even more under the spotlight. BART officials said Wednesday they don’t know when he will return. Johnson’s response to email messages says that he is on a two-month leave for family reasons and he will return around Oct. 17.

His previous email message had him returning Sept. 19, but that was amended with the later return time.

Johnson, the chief media spokesman for an agency often in the news, made news in the last month during the continuing tensions between BART and protesters and hackers upset with shootings by BART police officers.
-Inside Bay Area

Family reasons?
More like he has been shamed into submission by anonymous hackers who posted a picture of him exposing his family jewels while embracing a shirtless man.
His incompetence on the job, which is detailed in the Inside Bay Area article quoted above, pales in comparison to the damage done by this.
Even though Anonymous gets accused of being immature and unfocused, I call this brilliant move very strategic and very targeted, and apparently, extremely effective.
Immature, maybe, but effective as well.
When you're paid a helluva lot of money to be a public persona, don't be surprised if your persona is made public.

NMA Anonymous/BART cartoon

War against BART

BART police union website hacked

Now we're talkin. Anonymous hacked into the MyBART website and released names and contact info of its customers on Sunday. That's how they usually roll, and it's a tactic that doesn't exactly win them a lot of public support. However, today, in the wake of a mildly annoying protest in San Francisco on Monday, they took the fight to the cops.

A hacker group broke into a BART police union website Wednesday and released names, home addresses, email addresses and personal passwords of 102 officers in the second cyberattack against the transit system in a week.

BART and the police union confirmed the attack and criticized it as jeopardizing the security of police officers, who guard their home addresses carefully.
-Inside Bay Area

BART cuts cell phone service, then has to shut down stations due to protests

This week, Operation Empire State Rebellion has set its sites on San Francisco.
On Sunday, Anonymous hacked into the MyBART website and published the contact info of its customers. The group called for a protest at the SF Civic Center BART station, where BART police officers murdered a "wobbly drunk" homeless man after he threw a knife on July 3.
Two BART officers approached 45 year-old Charles Hill on the Civic Center platform and shot him dead within 23 seconds of their arrival. They did not claim to mistake their guns for tasers...because only an idiot would do that.
At least one witness has publicly stated that Hill was neither running away nor lunging at the officers. BART station video of the shooting shows an object (allegedly a knife) sliding along the ground past an officer's feet (after it was thrown against a train) as he fires his weapon. Several people are seen slowly walking away from the scene, clearly not fearing for their lives. However, they begin to hurry away once the police start shooting.

Allegedly, Hill had first thrown a bottle at the officers, although there is no video evidence. This naturally begs the question....if a "wobbly drunk" throws a bottle and then a knife at officers, is he still a threat? He had no weapons on him when he was shot, so how can the police claim "self-defense?" Why did they opt for guns instead of tasers?
Having any object tossed at you is certainly cause for alarm, but IMHO, it doesn't justify murder/manslaughter/death-related-to-an-officer-involved-shooting.
BART seems to think it does though, as neither officer has been disciplined. One of them has actually been hired by the FBI, who is obviously impressed with his police work (murdering a drunken homeless man within 23 seconds of encountering him).

Two weeks later, and just a few days after the SFPD murder of Kenneth Harding over transit fare evasion, a protest shutdown 3 BART stations in downtown San Francisco. Protestors held open the doors of a train, and one man attempted to climb on top of a train.
On August 11, another protest was called for at the Civic Center station. BART officials got wind of it, and shut off cell phone service in all of the downtown SF BART stations.
This was the same week that the UK government talked openly of cutting off internet service amidst nationwide rioting in response to the police murder of Mark Duggan.
The tactic by BART succeeded in thwarting the protest for that day, but it opened up a whole new can of worms for the transit agency.
Anonymous got involved, hacked the MyBART website, and called for a 3rd protest on Monday, August 15. That protest only temporarily closed down several stations, but passengers were frustrated by the lack of communication from BART about where and when service would be restored.

For the better part of two hours, passengers were allowed to disembark trains and stations, but were not allowed to enter them, forcing commuters to seek other ways home. Some sat on the steps down to the BART stations, simply waiting out the chaos. Others walked from station to station, chasing rumors — many originating from BART officials themselves — that they had reopened.
-SF Examiner

Cell phone service was not interrupted this time.

Here's a great video of BART mouthpiece Linton Johnson defending HIS decision to cut off cell phone service on August 11...even though he initially denied that BART had done it, and then blamed subordinates for the decision once it became clear that BART was responsible.

You can't really get more spineless than that.

Both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced today that they have backed off from threatened legal action against BART over the denial of service.

Oscar Grant civil cases can proceed

A federal judge has ruled that Oscar Grant's family and some of his fellow BART passengers can go ahead with both illegal arrest and unnecessary force civil lawsuits against the transit agency.
According to SFGate, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of San Francisco said that other evidence, including videos, suggested the 22-year-old Hayward man "was completely incapacitated and posed no threat to anyone," and therefore a jury should decide whether any force, including a stun gun, was justified.
It is also questionable whether or not it was lawful for BART police to detain Oscar Grant and the other men in the first place.

2nd Former BART Cop Testifies that Grant was Under Police Control

For the second day in a row, a former BART Cop has testified that Oscar Grant was NOT a physical threat to any officers when he was shot in the back while lying face down with an officer's knee on the back of his neck.

At the moment Mehserle stood up and fired, Stein asked, "You felt you had control of Mr. Grant?"

"Yes," (Former BART Cop Anthony) Pirone said.
-SF Chronicle

Pirone testified that he didn't feel physically threatened, even though he had punched Grant in the face just a few minutes earlier. When Mehserle asked him to get up off of Grant before the shooting, he wasn't quite sure what the defendant was up to:

Pirone said he thought, "Why am I getting up? I don't understand. Why he is telling me that?"
-Oakland Tribune

Pirone, who has been fired from his job, admitted to yelling a racial epithet at Grant shortly before the murder. He said it was "sarcasm."

The fired former BART Cop also admitted that he has watched endless amounts of video footage in preparation for his testimony, almost insinuating that his handlers are asking him to lie:

Pirone admitted that he has a hard time separating what is in his memory and what he has seen on the various video recordings of the shooting of the 22-year-old Hayward man and the events that led to it.

"It's like trying to unscramble an egg," Pirone said.
-Oakland Tribune

Why would he need to separate or "unscramble" anything if it was all the truth?