Anarchy Phone

U.S. Works to Deploy Secret Internet, Mobile Phone Systems for Dissidents

New details have emerged about a secret U.S. effort to deploy shadow internet and mobile phone systems overseas to give political dissidents a way to communicate with the world free of government censorship. The New York Times reports the project involves developing what has been described as an "Internet in a suitcase" that would allow dissidents to use “mesh network” technology to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. Part of the effort is being led by Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation. Meinrath described part of the project on Democracy Now! in April.

Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation, Open Technology Initiative Director: “So we’ve been working on a number of technologies to develop distributed communication systems, so that you can turn cell phones, for example, into a medium that doesn’t need to go through a cell tower, a central location, but communicate in a peer-to-peer manner, directly with one another. And so, you can imagine if you daisy-chain a lot of these together, you can actually have an entire network built out of the already existing hardware that doesn’t need a central authority.”

Attorney & Blogger Glenn Greenwald on the Arrest of Julian Assange and the U.S. "War on Whistle-blowers"

"Well, I just want to underscore how alarming everything is that you just described, both in that report and in your earlier one, which is, whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they’ve never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. And yet, look at what has happened to them. They’ve been essentially removed from the internet, not just through a denial of service attacks that are very sophisticated, but through political pressure applied to numerous countries. Their funds have been frozen, including funds donated by people around the world for his—for Julian Assange’s defense fund and for WikiLeaks’s defense fund. They’ve had their access to all kinds of accounts cut off. Leading politicians and media figures have called for their assassination, their murder, to be labeled a terrorist organization. What’s really going on here is a war over control of the internet and whether or not the internet can actually serve what a lot of people hoped its ultimate purpose was, which was to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions. That’s what this really is about. It’s why you see Western government, totally lawlessly, waging what can only be described as a war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange outside the bounds of any constraints, because that’s what really is at stake here. If they want to prosecute them, they should go to court and do it through legal means. But this extralegal persecution ought to be very alarming to every citizen in every one of these countries, because it essentially is pure authoritarianism and is designed to prevent the internet from being used as its ultimate promise, which is providing a check on unconstrained political power."   - Glenn Greenwald

Just Like the Internet You See in the Movies

No Web sites that choke your browser. No waiting for YouTube clips to buffer. No email attachments too big to send. No files that take forever to download. No "Loading - please wait" messages, or spinning beach balls, or slowwwwly lengthening bars meant to tame your mounting impatience.

That's how the Internet works in the movies. On laptops and cell phones and the rest of the small screens we watch on the big screen, the Internet is a tantalizingly perfected version of the hiccupping marvel we know now.

In a handful of years at most, the blinding speed and reliability we see in the movies will be available here in reality. Too bad it won't be available on the Internet.

Last week, Google and Verizon announced their plans for the future. Their message was that if you want to do the cool stuff in real life that Tom Cruise and Matt Damon do online in the movies, you're going to have to buy a subscription to the other Internet, the superduper one that the telecom and wireless giants are going to build next.