Second "Anonymous" Protest Disrupts Evening BART Service

[Update 11:48 p.m.] ABC7 News reports that police arrested a total of 45 protesters over the course of the evening — five protesters were arrested by BART police, and 40 were arrested by the San Francisco Police Department.

[UPDATE 9:15 p.m.] After about three hours of protesting and off-and-on again closures of the Civic Center and Powell BART and Muni stations, the San Francisco Examiner broke the news that the Anonymous-led protest in San Francisco came to an end around 8:35 p.m. BART service has returned to normal, with trains stopping at all stations.

KGO Radio reports that police made about a couple dozen arrests at Larkin and Grove streets in San Francisco, to stop the protesters' seemingly endless treks between the Civic Center and Powell Street stations reported by Mission Loc@l, that periodically caused each, if not both stations, to close. Additionally, it was reported that protesters converged upon UN Plaza and blocked traffic on Market Street. The arrests outside of San Francisco's Main Library branch on Larkin Street came after eight arrests reported earlier in the evening by The Bay Citizen.

It all started around 5:30 p.m., according to 511.org transit alerts, when BART closed Civic Center station for the first time. In total, the Civic Center station was closed three times, and Powell Street was closed four times over the course of the evening. The closures affected both BART and Muni trains, which did not stop at the stations.

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The group known as Anonymous is holding another Monday evening protest at Civic Center BART station. The protest may affect train service to and from San Francisco after 5 p.m.

BART advises customers to follow 511.org's transit alerts to be aware of any changes to train service.

"Monday 5pm outside the civic center," a tweet circulating Anonymous Twitter accounts over the weekend read. "Peaceful as always."

This follows a protest held by the group , also at Civic Center BART station, that spread to the Powell, Embarcadero and Montgomery stations. The protest caused all four downtown BART and Muni stations to be temporarily closed.

As of 11 a.m. on Sunday, to this week's protest on a Facebook page for the event, according to reporting by the Bay City News Service.

The protests are in response to BART's controversial decision to cut off cell phone service inside of its downtown San Francisco stations on Thursday, Aug. 11, suspecting demonstrators against the July 3 shooting of Charles Hill would be using cell phones to organize a protest. No protest materialized on that day.

BART issued an online letter to its customers on Saturday, stating that the decision to interrupt cell phone service was made "out of an overriding concern for our passengers’ safety." It went on to read that BART's decision "was not intended to and did not affect any First Amendment rights of any person to protest in a lawful manner in areas at BART stations that are open for expressive activity."

The transit agency will discuss the cell phone service cut-off at a special Board of Directors meeting on Wednesday.

Last Monday — the same day as Anonymous's last protest — a union of 900 BART employees, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, released a statement  executive management's handling of the recent incidents, stating, "The people who run BART have lost our confidence and are putting rider and employee safety at risk."

Anonymous members have hacked into two BART websites this month, its MyBART promotional site and . On each occasion some user information found on the sites, belonging to thousands of BART customers and 102 police officers, was made public via online posts — including postal addresses and online passwords.

"We apologize to any citizen that has his information published, but you should go to BART and ask them why your information wasn't secure with them," the protest group said in a statement on one of its websites after MyBART was hacked. It added, "probably the only information that will be abused from this database is that of BART employees."

Berkeley Patch will update this article with the latest transit information during the protest.