Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 16:43 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
Parent article: Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Inside a population center we have the technology necessary to create distributed networks between citizens that governments can't easily disrupt. You can't easily for example stop the flow of information to people living in a reasonable sized city with the advent of wireless networking technology. If people inside of a city or town want to run a darknet over wireless it can be done with off the shelf retail equipment and governments won't be able to easily shut it down.

But at a large scale, a scale that encompasses recognized geopolitical boundaries even as small as political regions inside of a single country, information systems are still centralized enough for an information kill switch to be possible. And because its possible, governments will consider it a tool to be used. Its just a matter of particular government particularities that will determine when and where a particular government will reach for the tool. There's nothing sacrosanct about Western governments that would prevent the use of a kill switch under any situation.

The only way to stop this sort of blackout is to figure out a way to build a global network that is truly decentralized in terms of infrastructure. And I don't see that happening anytime soon. Privately owned pico-satellites aren't a reality yet.

-jef

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 16:56 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (10 responses)

I think Diaspora could help. Sadly for the people of Egypt, it didn't take off for real yet.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 17:14 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (9 responses)

I think you miss the point. Internet services are not the issue. The issue is the physical infrastructure which makes the internet possible. That physical infrastructure is still very highly centralized. The inter-links between countries even more so. It doesn't matter if diaspora exists or not as a distribute service. When a government cuts physical access to the internet to the internet by pulling the plug on the routers it controls and cuts physical access to cellphone networks it controls and cuts sat uplinks it controls... the existance of diaspora doesn't matter.

-jef

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 17:30 UTC (Fri) by ajb (subscriber, #9694) [Link] (8 responses)

Not completely true: The problem for the Egyptian authorities are worried about their citizens communicating freely with each other- not with foreigners. Cutting off international access removes access to twitter and facebook. If diaspora was widespread, cutting off the rest of the internet wouldn't help.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:10 UTC (Fri) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (7 responses)

I've read reports that they also shut down the .eg resolvers: so even if you had Diaspora, for most users without a DNS address it would be as good as offline too.

The only realistic way to have a system which would be out of Government control would be some mesh-based wireless network which had a decentralised naming system. In a country like Egypt there are obvious geographical problems with an idea like that, and even in a best case you'd need a substantial amount of coverage for it to be practical.

I think it basically has to be acknowledged that there is essentially no technical solution that can fend off such an attack: fundamentally, Governments that are unable to exercise control over such key infrastructure are not really in power in the first place.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 19:56 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (3 responses)

Why would a mesh based wired system not work also?

It's almost as if the current history and the status quo prevents us from thinking that things could be different.

An alternate course to a monopolistic phone company based phone network (and thus internet) system could well have evolved (and still could, if people cared) by the cooperative efforts of individuals, communities and corporations. People can/could have run wires to their immediate neighbors' houses if they felt like it (and the laws didn't prevent it, which they likely do in most jurisdictions). Communities can/could have funded and owned the wires to other communities. Corporations can/could fund (and charge for) some infrastructure for long hauls and could help local efforts when requested to do so. Such a system of distributed responsibility would be much harder to control and censor then one built in the first place, and still owned in most cases, by government monopoly.

All it takes is: ...the desire, the belief that it is important, and the removal/circumvention of any legislative barriers to it.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 20:14 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

mesh networks work over a short range, but only in relativly low useage environments. for longer range you need long range single hops. they can be provided wirelessly, but that takes fixed infrastructure (towers, tight directional antennas, satellites, etc) but plain old wire is much cheaper to operate (even if it may be more expensive to run initially) and is FAR more reliable

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 29, 2011 11:38 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (1 responses)

A mesh wired system would absolutely work, but the likelihood of being able to setup such a system seems remote to me. National telecoms infrastructure generally isn't designed like that for practical reasons, and wires are even more hostage to local geography than wireless is.

its been done in spain

Posted Jan 31, 2011 11:21 UTC (Mon) by albertoafn (guest, #64225) [Link]

its been done in spain
Its far from ideal but I suggest you to do the same thing in your country

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:03 UTC (Fri) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (2 responses)

In a country like Egypt there are obvious geographical problems with an idea like that

Not necessarily; most Egyptians live in the Nile Delta; the rest of the country is mostly empty desert.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 29, 2011 11:41 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (1 responses)

Right, but if you have a broad wireless mesh then radio jamming in one specific area wouldn't do much more than local damage; other routes could be found.

If a wireless mesh was effectively mostly linear along a river, then you only need to jam it in a couple of points to cause serious global issues for the entire network.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 31, 2011 18:36 UTC (Mon) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

"If a wireless mesh was effectively mostly linear along a river, then you only need to jam it in a couple of points to cause serious global issues for the entire network."

Use wire at those points.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 17:42 UTC (Fri) by nof (guest, #61716) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, what would YOU do if placed in such a situation?
I would think that most persons with IT knowledge automatically put their mind on the case.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 20:15 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

When the government orders the backbone providers to literally pull the power from their datacenters to shutdown the internet there is not much you can do.

Unless you feel like raiding the centers and forcing the power back on.

Even wireless can blocked. When it comes to the internet your still dependent on the physical world and the people with the guns set the rules.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 22:55 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

Generally speaking... a solution that requires political protesters to forcibly take control over any government or privately owned infrastructure in order to get a working network back up and running after a government switch off is a bad solution as that sort of activity can be manipulated by governments as a pretext for an increased level of violent response against the activists.

-jef

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:23 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Quite possibly. I certainly was not advocating it. I was just stating the obvious. That is what it would take to keep internet running in the case of a government level order to shut it down.

Of course governments have had no problem just making pretexts out of thin air in order to squash political dissent. The majority of governments carry out acts of violence against their own citizens as just a matter of course and then dream up justifications well after the fact.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 31, 2011 13:36 UTC (Mon) by morganr (guest, #43385) [Link]

Well, Mubarak wants to rule the country and has ordered the police and army to disperse his opponents (using deadly force). Meanwhile they are attempting to call as many of the population onto the streets as possible and hold a general strike in an attempt to force him out.
State control over means of communication (state tv, ISP infrastructure) will prevent these calls from reaching the population quickly and helps stop the movement.

You are proposing to side-step the question of taking over tv stations/ISPs/telephone exchanges by building a second communications network alongside the existing one. This won't work for two reasons 1) people who are revolting because £50 a month wage minus £30 rent can't buy food will not have the necessary equipment, 2) The Egyptian government can use some of the $1.3bn military aid from the US to buy 2.4GHz radio detector vans to drive around and arrest regime opponents with their own network.

Classically in Barcelona and St. Petersburg the revolutionaries were able to take control of the telephone/telegraph exchange and prevent the state from organising itself effectively. The same logic applies today, just that the IP infrastructure that is also important in organising a revolution or its counter-revolution.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:21 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Funny thing, we HAD such an infrastructure before.

During the last days of the USSR the most reliable news were transmitted by FIDONet, running over the phone lines, radio links and a variety of other media types. There was even an illicit underwater cable running to Finland.

During the 93's White House shooting in Russia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_... ), the famous Kremvax was used to send news about the tanks in Moscow into the foreign newsgroups.

However, it all requires a strong technophilic community which just is not there right now.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 19:07 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link]

The internet has made us lazy. Most of the time we can press a button and talk to much of the world, so why should we spend effort designing and building wireless adhoc darknets or even learning ham radio?

Of course some rare individuals rally enjoy tinkering with this stuff, but isolated people don't make an interesting network. A network of one is not that valuable. It's not just technophilic which is required, but people who are so extremely technophilic that they'll spend time and money building "unnecessary" rube-goldberg networks.

Unless we can find some real value for these kinds of networks outside of rare censorship events they simply won't be built.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 29, 2011 21:43 UTC (Sat) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Tell us more about that underwater cable! Sounds like a remarkable story.

I too was involved in FidoNet but almost all ran over modem lines which would have been even easier to shut down than the Internet of today. Also, it was a store-and-forward network whichs is unfair to compare to a packet-switching network.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 30, 2011 1:12 UTC (Sun) by edison (guest, #54104) [Link]

I am curious of more information about the illicit underwater cable?

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 30, 2011 16:57 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Er, inside a reasonably-sized city people can just walk around and *talk* to each other. Wireless mesh networks are unimportant beside that vast rumour mill. :)

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 30, 2011 18:49 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

A modern mesh network would still provide a valuable resource in a city-wide protest for logistical and intelligence which could aid the execution of any well organized protest action simply because its faster than sneakernet. Sneakernet would of course still have value and people will use whatever resources are available.

-jef

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 30, 2011 22:57 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That's true: it would give the common people communications equal to that of their probable opposition, be they invaders or (more likely these days) the local security services.