[Imc-makerspace] [UCIMC-Tech] 3 IMC techies featured in Wired Magazine

[Stewart Dickson]

Woot!   This is HUGE!   Meinrath, Duggan and King -- forwarding to the 
Makerspace list.

On 12/17/11 11:04 AM, Danielle Chynoweth wrote:
>
>
>   http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/internet-suitcase-dc/all/1
>
>
>   U.S.-Funded Internet Liberation Project Finds Perfect Test Site:
>   Occupy D.C.
>
>     * By Ryan Singel
>       <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/author/ryan_singel/> Email
>       Author <mailto:ryan at ryansingel.net>
>     * December 15, 2011  |
>     * 6:30 am  |
>
> <http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2015/11/111115BH0219.jpg>
>
> Occupy D.C. protesters preparing to livestream a solidarity march. 
> Photo: Brendan Hoffman/Wired.com
>
> When Sascha Meinrath saw the Occupy encampment in D.C., he saw 
> something few others would — a testbed for technology.
>
> Meinrath <http://newamerica.net/user/70> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> “This started due to massive naiveté,” said Meinrath, whose official 
> title is Director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology 
> Initiative <http://oti.newamerica.net/dashboard>. “I had no idea of 
> the complexity of solving these problems.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> <http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-tent1.jpg> 
>
>
> 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
>
> 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.
>
> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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”.
>
> “Finding a place to use the system is difficult,” Meinrath said. 
> “Thank God for the Occupy movement.”
>
> 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.
>
> But please don’t take it as an endorsement of Occupy DC’s politics, 
> Meinrath says.
>
> “We hope the Tea Party will launch a sleep-in and we can hit both ends 
> of the political spectrum,” he said.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> <http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/12/mesh-wifi-stroller.jpg> 
>
>
> 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
>
> “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.”
>
> 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.
>
> “The signal strength [of Commotion] is poor. … The service itself has 
> been shitty. That’s why we’re using Clear,” Kenny said.
>
> 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.
>
> Josh King, the technical lead on the project, is excited, even if the 
> protesters aren’t.
>
> “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.”
>
> “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.”
>
> 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.
>
> But for now Meinrath is happy with the test.
>
> 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.
>
> Meinrath points to Frank Legendre’s work on what’s known as disaster 
> mode for Twitter (download it at Twimight 
> <http://code.google.com/p/twimight/>) as an example of what an app 
> built for such a network could look like.
>
> “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.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> “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.”
>
> /Additional reporting and writing by Spencer Ackerman./
>
>
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