[silk] Collateral damage

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Udhay Shankar N <udhay@pobox.com> -----

Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 08:12:25 +0530
From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay@pobox.com>
To: silklist@lists.hserus.net
Subject: Re: [silk] Collateral damage
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Reply-To: silklist@lists.hserus.net

On 20-Aug-13 10:57 PM, Dave Long wrote:

> Steganets ("none of you has ever seen a dead donkey") might be a little
> less obvious than darknets (and the normally abysmal S/N ratio of social
> networks may actually provide decent channel bandwidth?)

Interesting example of a darknet:

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greek-off-the-grid-internet-mesh/

Greek community creates an off-the-grid Internet

By Joe Kloc on August 19, 2013 Email Follow http://twitter.com/joekloc

In an effort to buck the expensive rates of unreliable corporate telecom
companies, a community in Athens, Greece has created its own private
Internet.

Built from a network of wireless rooftop antennas, the Athens Wireless
Metropolitan Network (AWMN) now has more than 1,000 members. Data moves
“through” the AWMN mesh up to 30 times faster than it does on the
telecom-provided Internet.

According to Mother Jones, this off-the-grid community has become so
popular in Athens and on nearby islands that it has developed its own
Craigslist-esque classifieds service as well as blogs and an internal
search engine.

"It's like a whole other web," AWMN user Joseph Bonicioli told the
magazine. "It's our network, but it's also a playground."

The AWMN began in 2002 in response to the poor Internet service provided
by traditional telecommunications companies in Athens. However, the past
few years have illustrated another use for these citizen-run meshes:
preserving the democratic values of the Internet.

As the Internet has become a ubiquitous presence in day-to-day life,
governments around the world have sought to control it. In 2011 for
example, when former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak found out that
protesters were organizing on Facebook, he commanded the country’s
Internet service providers to shut down access, denying 17 million
Egyptians access to the Web for days.

Later that year in the U.S., the city of San Francisco temporarily shut
down cellphone service in its transit system to stop a protest.

As Bonicioli told Mother Jones, "When you run your own network, nobody
can shut it down."

These DIY meshes are also used to provide Internet in places major
telecom companies can’t—or won’t—reach. For example, one was constructed
last year in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook after Hurricane Sandy
knocked out resident’s access to the networks of major Internet service
providers.

Similarly, Guifi, the largest mesh in the world, was built to address
spotty Internet service in rural Spain. It has over 21,000 members.

Meshes have taken on new relevance in the wake of former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about the agency’s
massive Internet surveillance programs.

It is estimated (albeit roughly) that the NSA touches as much as half of
the world’s Internet communications each day. The agency gains access to
much of this information through partnerships with telecom companies
that allow the agency to install splitters on their fibre optic Internet
cables. Privately run meshes would deny the NSA—and other government
intelligence agencies around the world—this access point to Internet data.

As the New America Foundation’s Sascha Meinrath told Mother Jones,
"We're making infrastructure for anyone who wants to control their own
network."

-- 
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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