<h1><font style="font-weight:normal" size="2"><a 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>
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By <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/author/ryan_singel/" title="Posts by Ryan Singel">Ryan Singel</a> <a href="mailto:ryan@ryansingel.net">
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December 15, 2011 |
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6:30 am |
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<div id="attachment_34418" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width:670px"><a href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2015/11/111115BH0219.jpg"><img class="size-large wp-image-34418" title="occupy dc internet" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2015/11/111115BH0219-660x440.jpg" alt="" width="660" height="440"></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 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 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 href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-tent1.jpg"><img 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="" width="660" height="440"></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 href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-stroller.jpg"><img 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="" width="660" height="440"></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 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>