"Spy-proof networks, but fears on privacy" by Carlotta Gall and James Glanz | New York Times April 21, 2014
SAYADA, Tunisia — This Mediterranean fishing town, with its low, whitewashed buildings and sleepy port, is an unlikely spot for an experiment in rewiring the global Internet. But residents have a surprising level of digital savvy and sharp memories of how the Internet can be misused.
Academics and computer enthusiasts who took part in the 2011 uprising in Tunisia that overthrew a government deeply invested in digital surveillance have helped their town become a test case for an alternative: a physically separate, local network made up of cleverly programmed antennas scattered about on rooftops.
The State Department provided $2.8 million to a team of US hackers, activists, and software geeks to develop the system, called a mesh network, as a way for dissidents abroad to communicate more freely and securely.
Yeah, it turns out that largest employers of hackers is the US government! In this case they fomented a coup!
Even before the network in Sayada went live in December, pilot projects financed in part by the State Department proved that the mesh could serve poor neighborhoods in Detroit and function as a digital lifeline in part of Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy. But just like people overseas, Americans increasingly cite fears of government snooping in explaining the appeal of mesh networks.
Yeah, the U.S government is here to help those they helped toss into poverty.
“There’s so much invasion of privacy on the Internet,” said Michael Holbrook, of Detroit, referring to surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Since this mesh project began three years ago, its original aim — foiling government spies — has become an awkward subject for US officials and some of the technical experts.
The NSA, as described in secret documents leaked by former contractor Edward J. Snowden, has been shown to be a global Internet spy with few, if any, peers.
“Exactly at the time that the NSA was developing the technology that Snowden has disclosed, the State Department was funding some of the most powerful digital tools to protect freedom of expression around the world,” said Ben Scott, a former State Department official now at a Berlin policy nonprofit, New Responsibilities Foundation.
So Orwellian!
Sayada’s mesh network’s users have access to a local server containing Wikipedia in French and Arabic, town street maps, 2,500 free books in French, and an app for secure chatting and file sharing. The mesh is not linked to the wider Internet.
There are some drawbacks, as communications can slow when signals make multiple “hops” from one router to another, leading some Internet experts to question how large a single mesh could grow. Other experts counter that mesh networks in Europe, including some serving large sections of Berlin, Vienna, and Barcelona, have thousands of routers, although they require highly technical skills.
Many of those networks were built to compensate for spotty or nonexistent coverage by corporate Internet providers. A similar motivation is at work in some Detroit neighborhoods, where the State Department financed trial runs of mesh networks as a low-cost gateway to wireless Internet access and as a community organizing tool.
Why is the STATE DEPARTMENT spending money on this DOMESTIC SPY PROGRAM?
But privacy issues provoke intense discussion, particularly among groups that have been targets of racial and other profiling, said Diana J. Nucera, community technology director at an organization called Allied Media Projects, which has helped Detroit neighborhoods put up mesh networks.
“I don’t want the NSA, the government, anyone to necessarily know how I think about something,” Holbrook, an African-American who is a Detroit social and political activist, said at a workshop led by Nucera.
Tell him to give Al Sharpton a call.
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Related:
"How can America really promote democracy abroad?; One lesson of the Arab Spring: We’re putting billions of dollars into efforts that may not help" by Thanassis Cambanis | Globe Correspondent April 27, 2014
Modern democracy tends to come with a strong evangelical spirit. If voting and personal liberty are good for us, the thinking goes, surely they’re worth spreading to the world as well.
The foreign policy driven by this belief is known as “democracy promotion,” and has long been an explicit goal of Western governments. At least since the 1950s, institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have aimed to promote democratic values in the economic and political life of developing countries.
I suppose when you are part of the 1% you need to tell yourself that because no one else believes that. No one believes these wars or those institutions are to promote democracy because they are not. It's simply something the war profiteers and globe-kickers tell us.
The favored method is a top-down approach: Democracy-promotion groups funnel money to nascent political parties and help train people to run the institutions considered central to democracy, from elections commissions to associations for judges and lawyers. Western advisers push democratic ideas and try to strengthen local civic organizations. Then, when the opportunity for a new government arises, the wisdom goes, we have only to step back and watch citizens embrace it.
It may sound naive to think you can midwife societal change or transplant political ideals, but this method has long been almost universally accepted among policy makers. Even those lukewarm in their support for democracy promotion itself have believed it can work this way.
This self-aggrandizing way of describing mass-murdering invasions and overthrows for resources, power, and money is sickening.
Then came the Arab uprisings that began in 2010. America and other Western nations had been working for decades and investing hundreds of millions of dollars to support a vast network of pro-democracy organizations across the Arab world. Based on prevailing theories, once protests started to shake one authoritarian government after another, the popular momentum should have been unstoppable.
Instead, the results have been dismal. In nearly every case—arguably, the only exception is Tunisia—the countries that rose up against dictators ended up less democratic than they began. Now, armed with new case studies from the Arab uprisings, a group of contrarian political scientists is arguing for a radical reconsideration of the whole notion of how to spread democracy to other nations—or if it’s even possible at all.
What, the threat and gun approach of AmeriKa not working?
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While it started with national governments and intergovernmental organizations, democracy promotion has grown into an industry of its own. High profile groups funded by the US government, like the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, have became ubiquitous on the international scene. They help design elections, train political parties, and give advice to student groups and labor unions. A plethora of less-well-known organizations fund workshops and international travel for lawyers, human rights advocates, and community organizers.
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There’s also an argument that we simply can’t tell how well democracy-promotion efforts work, since they’re always happening in the context of other foreign policy operations as well—some of them working at cross-purposes, and at a much larger scale. In Egypt, for example, the United States spends a few millions on overt democracy-promotion efforts, supporting civil society groups that monitor the regime’s abuses of human rights, while simultaneously giving billions to support the same repressive regime as a political ally. In Iran, the United States aims to empower citizens to challenge the ayatollahs in street demonstrations and on Twitter, but at the same time impoverishes them through economic sanctions. In Bahrain, which depends on a US naval base for military protection, the United States stood aside while the government violently crushed its pro-democracy movement in 2011, apparently deciding the security relationship trumped its interest in nudging a nation toward democracy....
What more do you really need to know?
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Tunisia is the only success, huh?
Nothing confusing about that, 'eh?
