Apparently we need a new net?

6th February 2011

Post reblogged from helen_bop with 37 notes

Apparently we need a new net?

Reading things like this hurts me.

Egypt Proves We Need a New Net

Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities.

Well, yes. What did you really expect?

Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points.

That’s not actually true at all.

There are two ways for internet traffic to pass between organisations. The first is paid-for, it’s called transit; your organisation pays another one to get your traffic to where it’s going, or closer. The second is mutual exchange peering; you pay a fee to a 3rd party to join a network that contains other providers doing the same thing, you all tell each other where you can get traffic to, and pass traffic around between you all on the understanding that it’s an equivalent exchange - the 3rd party is owned equally by all the organisations that pay it.

Mutual exchange peering points cannot be controlled by any single entity, governmental or not. Transit can be controlled by either entity that is part of it, but the vast majority of internet connected organisations will never rely on just one.

In addition, there are many of these around the world. If one of them is shut down then the traffic will route to another one - it is rare for people to put all their eggs into one basket, because there are too many potential problems to try to take you off the internet without even considering governmental acts against you.

That’s why President Hosni Mubarak’s regime had so little trouble shutting down his citizens’ networks when he wanted to. One phone call to each of the four internet service providers in his country was all it took. And while we might like to believe that couldn’t happen in the United States, we should remember that all it took was a call from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, to Amazon for the corporation to shut down WikiLeaks’ website recently.

Meanwhile, UK’s Vodaphone complied with Mubarak’s orders first to turn off cell phone use in Egypt, and later to flood cell phone users with incendiary pro-government messages. More virtual ink was spilled in the United States about Vodaphone-partner Verizon’s version of the iPhone than on Vodaphone’s utter complicity in the violence fomented by the commands it promoted through its networks. Although Vodaphone continues to apologize publicly for its ongoing policy of serving the goon squads of a dictatorial regime, it has also continued to follow that regime’s orders.

I’m sorry, what?

Seriously?

I’m a network engineer, not a martyr. If the people that can end me and mine, the people with guns and cuffs and prisons, come a knocking at the door then you’re damn right I’m going to shut things down. What do you expect of me? Do you expect Vodafone HQ to order their staff to disobey, and because they didn’t they are complicit? Do you call the people who obeyed out of fear complicit? Really? We’re people too.

With use of force it is entirely possible to systematically disassemble any network, whoever it is run by. Bit by bit, you threaten and coerce the people that run the parts. Each organisation, one by one. Little by little the network goes dark.

If bottom-up networks are this dependent on the good graces of top-down authorities for their very functioning, then how bottom-up are they? While in the United States we may have policies protecting free speech and open communication, it is these laws — and not some feature of our internet — that prevent the kinds of censorship we are witnessing in Egypt.

Any network you build will be dependent on the authorities in the jurisdiction they operate in. We need power. We need fibre in the ground that runs along highways, railways, waterways and across fields. We need the radio waves in the air over countries.

All of these can be interfered with. How are you going to stop that?

And, as we saw when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the United States, how quickly this very same authority can be used to cut off “enemies of the state” from access and funding.

This is how things are dismantled, as I explained already. It’s the people. They target the people.

Neither the problem, nor the solution, are technical.

So I say again; I am not a martyr or a hero, and I do not believe your access to information or communications is worth more than my life or well-being. If you at least allow us to shut things down gracefully and in a controlled manner, it will be easier to bring things back together when the situation improves. If you insist on us defying, then the people who wish to shut things down will destroy the power infrastructure, dig up the fibre, rip down the antennae, and remove critical components.

We do the best we can. I’m sorry it’s not good enough.

Source: azspot

The girl in the mirror

Apparently we need a new net?