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Woot! This is HUGE! Meinrath, Duggan and King -- forwarding to
the Makerspace list.<br>
<br>
On 12/17/11 11:04 AM, Danielle Chynoweth wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAJQ36wKJc=bmVvFj+FFXZtHAQmJ1=X+pDzXBMN+nNA9ySX31NQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<h1><font style="font-weight: normal;" size="2"><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/internet-suitcase-dc/all/1">http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/internet-suitcase-dc/all/1</a></font><br>
</h1>
<h1>U.S.-Funded Internet Liberation Project Finds Perfect Test
Site: Occupy D.C.</h1>
<div class="entryDescription">
<ul>
<li class="entryAuthor"> By <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/author/ryan_singel/"
title="Posts by Ryan Singel">Ryan Singel</a> <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:ryan@ryansingel.net">
<img moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/wp-content/themes/wired/images/envelope.gif"
alt="Email Author" border="0" height="11" width="14"> </a>
</li>
<li class="entryDate"> December 15, 2011 | </li>
<li class="entryTime"> 6:30 am | </li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="attachment_34418" class="wp-caption aligncenter"
style="width: 670px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2015/11/111115BH0219.jpg"><img
moz-do-not-send="true" class="size-large wp-image-34418"
title="occupy dc internet"
src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2015/11/111115BH0219-660x440.jpg"
alt="" height="440" width="660"></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">
Occupy D.C. protesters preparing to livestream a solidarity
march. Photo: Brendan Hoffman/Wired.com</p>
</div>
<p>When Sascha Meinrath saw the Occupy encampment in D.C., he saw
something few others would — a testbed for technology.</p>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://newamerica.net/user/70">Meinrath</a>
has been chasing a dream for more than a decade, ever since he
was a liberal arts grad student in Urbana, Illinois: community
wireless networks. From that small beginning, Meinrath now runs
a State Department-funded initiative to create an Internet in a
Suitcase — the Voice of America of the digital age.</p>
<p>If he has his way, Meinrath’s project will lead to low-cost,
easy-to-use wireless connections around the globe, all lashed
together in mesh that can withstand the whims of dictators
willing to pull the plug on the internet to quash dissent. He
and a team of software engineers are developing open-source
software to turn cheap wireless access points and Android
smartphones into nodes on the network, which could then be used
by dissidents to evade censorship and to spread low-cost
connections everywhere around the world. Proponents of the plan
include the U.S. State Department, which has given Meinrath a $2
million grant to develop the code.</p>
<p>“This started due to massive naiveté,” said Meinrath, whose
official title is Director of the New America Foundation’s <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://oti.newamerica.net/dashboard">Open Technology
Initiative</a>. “I had no idea of the complexity of solving
these problems.”</p>
<p>Before getting funding, Meinrath and his team of collaborators
had been building various community networks for years,
including a post-Katrina emergency connection network that
spanned three states. Community wireless networks in the U.S.
have generally failed to find acceptance, but massive scale
networks are possible, says Meinrath, pointing to examples in
Spain and Greece which are home to networks with thousands of
nodes.</p>
<p>With the emergence of an Occupy encampment in the nation’s
capital, Meinrath found a nearly perfect testbed for the
pre-alpha software — the site is weather-challenged, and full of
internet-hungry individuals constantly trying to update social
networking sites and make their own media. Exactly like what
happened in the Arab Spring.</p>
<div id="attachment_34476" class="wp-caption alignnone"
style="width: 670px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-tent1.jpg"><img
moz-do-not-send="true" class="size-full wp-image-34476"
title="mesh-wifi-tent"
src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-tent1.jpg"
alt="" height="440" width="660"></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">
The white router hanging in the center of the tech tent at the
Occupy D.C. encampment in McPherson Square is a test of the
Internet in a Suitcase project. Photo: Brendan
Hoffman/Wired.com</p>
</div>
<p>The Internet in a Suitcase project is based off a simple plan:
create software that’s easy to install and use on cheap hardware
which will seamlessly connect to any other access point around
it, creating a shared local network.</p>
<p>The custom software is called Commotion. It will work with
Android phones and with routers that support custom firmware,
like Ubiquiti Networks’ low-cost, carrier-grade wireless access
points. ”The firmware provides auto-configuration capabilities,”
said Brian Duggan, one of the engineers on the Internet in a
Suitcase project, “so you don’t need to be an engineer” to
install it. “You flash as many nodes as you want, or pick up
previous ones.”</p>
<p>The idea is that the system will automatically set itself up.
Drop a unit near another unit and they’ll start talking to one
another and trading data. Add another and all three will talk to
one another. Add a thousand and you can cover a whole city. Then
if one of those routers is hooked up to an internet connection,
everyone on the network can connect. If that connection
disappears, users can still try to update an application like
Twitter or send e-mail to the larger internet and the outgoing
notes will go into a holding pattern until the mesh network
finds another connection to the greater net.</p>
<p>That’s harder to pull off in practice, even under ideal
conditions — as anyone who’s tried to link even two Wi-Fi access
points in their own home could attest. Now throw in the
variables that the access points should work in urban and
exposed environments, as well as protest zones like Tahir
Square. You’ll want to protect dissidents with encryption and
deniability. And you don’t want your beta-testers to be arrested
or even killed because of a software bug. All together it’s the
kind of challenge engineers like to call “non-trivial”.</p>
<p>“Finding a place to use the system is difficult,” Meinrath
said. “Thank God for the Occupy movement.”</p>
<p>So over the last few weeks, Meinrath’s staff have tried to wire
up Occupy DC with a few custom-flashed wireless nodes hooked up
to the network via radio link to a nearby office’s donated
business connection.</p>
<p>But please don’t take it as an endorsement of Occupy DC’s
politics, Meinrath says.</p>
<p>“We hope the Tea Party will launch a sleep-in and we can hit
both ends of the political spectrum,” he said.</p>
<p>Right now, the project’s software is in “pre-release” form,
though it’s seeped into the wild at Occupy DC. You can find one
router in the media tent at in downtown McPherson Square, which
is home to about 200 protesters.</p>
<p>The Media Tent is built out of a bunch of tarps, with another
tarp separating the tent into two rooms. There’s a
graffiti-lined front door — an actual door — that is hinged to
nothing, a cheeky joke, since you get in by lifting the tarps.
Inside is a mess — there’s an office chair with ripped
upholstery, milk crates and ladders strewn about and a few
tables for desks. The park ground is the floor, augmented by
some cardboard and wood planks.</p>
<p>The Internet in a Suitcase hardware is a white Ubiquiti router
the size of a couple Snickers bars. It hangs from the makeshift
ceiling and is not noticeable unless you look for it.</p>
<p>To use it, you plug one end into the wall, another into a
bandwidth source, and you’re to be good to go. In theory. In
practice, the test at Occupy DC is drawing at best mixed reviews
from protesters, who say the technology is difficult to
configure, install and use.</p>
<div id="attachment_34473" class="wp-caption alignnone"
style="width: 670px;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-stroller.jpg"><img
moz-do-not-send="true" class="size-full wp-image-34473 "
title="mesh-wifi-stroller"
src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-stroller.jpg"
alt="" height="440" width="660"></a>
<p class="wp-caption-text">
The test network wasn't powerful enough to power this
protester's live-streaming baby stroller, demonstrating the
bandwidth demands that a dictator-proof network would need to
support. Photo: Brendan Hoffman/Wired.com</p>
</div>
<p>“It’s definitely a work in progress,” said Kelly Mears, who
seems to be the head of tech for Occupy DC and looks remarkably
like Mark Zuckerberg, albeit in a skinny brown tie and cardigan
instead of a hoodie. “It’s not exactly point and click. I’m
looking at a terminal window, on Linux.”</p>
<p>Kenny, another of Occupy DC’s tech people, is also slightly
unimpressed, though not critical of the New America team. He
pushes a Dell laptop in a baby stroller to livestream a protest
in the occupied McPherson Square’s central square, in solidarity
with the Occupy Wall Street eviction. The laptop is notably
hooked up to a commercial Clear Wi-Fi hotspot.</p>
<p>“The signal strength [of Commotion] is poor. … The service
itself has been shitty. That’s why we’re using Clear,” Kenny
said.</p>
<p>The signal strength starts conking out when you walk the
roughly 50 feet from the media tent to the center of the square.
There are typically 3 or 4 laptops from the media team
simultaneously using Commotion — its not clear how many other
devices are also taxing the system. It doesn’t help that there’s
a single connection to the net — a 1 Mbps connection at that —
which is linked to by a long range antenna. That kind of
connection is thin for livestreaming, even for one person in
ideal conditions.</p>
<p>Josh King, the technical lead on the project, is excited, even
if the protesters aren’t.</p>
<p>“It’s software under development,” King said. “This is a great
opportunity to test it, to get this kind of feedback and make
changes in real time.”</p>
<p>“It’s a real test bed,” adds Meinrath. “We’re getting the good,
bad and ugly … It’s not as stable as we would like, but we
working in real world where we don’t have optimum anything. It’s
a pre-alpha release providing connectivity to several hundred
people.”</p>
<p>The team is working to augment its internet bandwidth with
backhaul from the AFL-CIO and the ACLU. The latter would be
ideal, Meinrath says, because it’s unlikely that law enforcement
would try to subpoena the ACLU’s connection to spy on
protesters.</p>
<p>But for now Meinrath is happy with the test.</p>
<p>When, or if, the team figures out how to build a
point-and-click internet in a box, they hope it’ll become a
platform that developers can build smart and safe apps on.</p>
<p>Meinrath points to Frank Legendre’s work on what’s known as
disaster mode for Twitter (download it at <a
moz-do-not-send="true" title="twimight"
href="http://code.google.com/p/twimight/">Twimight</a>) as an
example of what an app built for such a network could look like.</p>
<p>“You could have a delay-tolerant Twitter, where people on the
local network could see your tweets and then when a connection
is restored it could get pushed to the internet,” Meinrath said.
“We are in the very infancy of this kind of intranet.”</p>
<p>That’s still a dream that’s a long way off. But Meinrath’s
project is not alone. Another community wireless group in Europe
won a $5 million grant to work on implementing such networks,
complementing his group’s emphasis on research and development.</p>
<p>Meinrath thinks it’s just a matter of time now before mesh
networks become a fact of life for most of the world — in
particular the two-thirds of it that aren’t high-income nations.</p>
<p>“Those initial years of having a very utopian but pragmatic
vision of connectivity for everyone is still driving this
project,” Meinrath said. “Twenty-first century statecraft is
aligned with those goals. It’s nice to have Hilary on your
side.”</p>
<p><em>Additional reporting and writing by Spencer Ackerman.</em></p>
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