[Freedombox-discuss] Routing around nationwide and international Internet blocks

Thomas Lord lord at emf.net
Mon Feb 28 02:02:13 UTC 2011


It might help this thread to look at the nature of
risk more carefully. 

Here is a thought experiment:

What if the government switched off all of the electricity 
in a country?    Aside from what could be done with 
remaining batteries and a handful of generators, electronic
communications would be essentially gone no matter what
kind of box we build.

The problem is, it's very hard for most governments to shut
down all electricity to crack down on the people.  (The
"smart meter" program in the US is making it easier for
the government to do so but that's a different story :-) .)

It isn't technologically hard for the government to cut
off power - just turn off the generation plants or cut the major
transmission lines.   The problem is that, then, the 
government also does not have electricity. 

It's hard, in other words, for a government to win a 
victory by completely shutting down the electric grid.

Similarly for shutting down the whole Internet.  Odds are,
part of the government's ability to coordinate a crackdown
depend on, well, not shutting down the whole internet.

It's far easier, though, for a government to distrupt 
a centralized communication server, or to spy on its database
of users.   

So it is low hanging fruit, so to speak, to make the 
oppressive tactics that are currently easy for governments --
harder.

We can never make perfect communications systems that simply
can't be disrupted.   We can only keep identifying which
oppressive techniques are easy and likely to pay off ... and
work to make those harder and less likely to pay off.

The analogy to electricity isn't perfect.  The architecture
of the Internet in theory and practice gives many governments
finer control over where to start cutting transmission lines ...
but only up to a point.

It's also worth noting that the trend in international 
reaction to a country "going dark" on the 'net is a trend of
increasing inclination to interfere and intervene.   So there
is also that externality:  shutting down the net accelerates
the rate at which other actions take action against the 
government that does so.

-t





On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 16:37 -0600, Anthony Papillion wrote:
> On 02/27/2011 04:27 PM, Matt Joyce wrote:
> > The only solution I can think of for this is a modular hardware design
> > at the physical level that allows for pluggable communication devices. 
> > Then allow individual groups to play with laser links, packet radio, gsm
> > / whatever in software defined radio.
> > 
> > The problem is mesh networking tends to not work well legally outside of
> > 802.xx standards and 2.4 ghz.
> > 
> > The plugs people have been discussing do not address these fundamental
> > needs.  I think that many members of this group are not concerned with
> > this feature set.
> > 
> > -Matt
> 
> Hi Matt,
> 
> I think you're right, there probably isn't a lot of interests in this
> feature within the group but I think it greatly limits a lot of the
> Freedom Box's utility. Of course, simply facilitating in-country
> communication IS very important and could easily be used to frustrate
> organized government efforts to stop demonstrations being organized or
> information being disseminated to interested parties within a particular
> country.
> 
> Still, I'd like to see the 'what happens at the border' question
> addressed to some degree. Thinking about it for a moment though, I
> suppose the answer to that would be outside of the purview of this group
> as it would involve communication technologies that wouldn't be directly
> addressable by the Freedom Box. So maybe it is a non-issue for the
> project. I'll have to think about it a bit.
> 
> Thanks for the input. This project is pretty awesome!
> 
> Anthony
> 
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