Weaving a New 'Net: A Mesh-Based Solution for Democratizing Networked Communications

Recent developments, from the mass release of sensitive diplomatic cables by Wikileaks to the social media–fueled revolutions and protests currently gripping the Middle East and North Africa, have underscored the increasingly vital role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in geopolitical affairs. Further, a wealth of recent research demonstrates the growing importance of digital networks in fostering cultural innovation and a vibrant public sphere, and the increasing centrality of these technologies to the daily lives of billions of individuals across the globe. Given the centrality of ICTs to these emerging changes in our social, cultural, and political landscapes, and the oft-invoked observation that “code is law,” it is essential that we develop and maintain a communications infrastructure that will enable individuals and communities (especially those in danger of political repression) to participate and contribute fully and actively to the public sphere, and to communicate confidently in private. Unfortunately, today’s infrastructure is not fully adequate to achieve this end. As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently observed, “the internet continues to be constricted in myriad ways worldwide.” While this is certainly the case in repressive political regimes from China to Iran, we face significant obstacles to “internet freedom” in America, as well. Although the internet is highly decentralized in its communication and social patterns, its technical and regulatory foundations are extremely hierarchical, due to centralized control by organizations like ICANN and oligopolistic ownership of network access. As a result of this centralization, digital communications are vulnerable to a degree of surveillance and censorship WEAVING A NEW ‘NET: A MESH-BASED SOLUTION 3 that would be unthinkable in traditional social arenas, threatening free speech and cyberliberties. Many laws and regulations exploit, rather than ameliorate this threat. Seemingly disparate factors like tiered access, intellectual property laws and national security measures, taken in combination, threaten to produce a communications environment in which cultural innovation is stifled, normative behaviors are criminalized, and political dissidence is dangerous or impossible. We believe that a new architecture is required in order to protect the continuance of civil liberties in networked society. In this article, we propose 10 “social specifications” describing the requirements of such an architecture, and outline a project called MondoNet designed to meet these specifications using ad hoc, wireless mesh networking technologies. We also address the legal and technical challenges facing the MondoNet project, and anticipate future developments in this field. WEAVING A NEW ‘NET: A MESH-BASED SOLUTION 4 Weaving a New ‘Net: A Mesh-Based Solution for Democratizing Networked Communications Introduction On February 15, 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech entitled “Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices & Challenges in a Networked World,” in which she reaffirmed America’s commitment to “internet freedom” as an increasingly vital element of our foreign policy (Clinton, 2011). In her words, internet freedom is “about ensuring that the internet remains a space where activities of all kinds can take place, from grand, groundbreaking, historic campaigns to the small, ordinary acts that people engage in every day.” Or, to put it simply, the internet is essential to the exercise of free speech and civil liberties in networked society. Recent political developments around the world appear to support this argument. Although the internet has been a platform for political speech and social action virtually since its inception (Rheingold, 1993), digital communications platforms have become an increasingly central component of resistance movements and other organized social action over the past five years, and consequently an increasingly popular target for repression, censorship, and surveillance. As Secretary Clinton herself observed, social and mobile media were important tools for both organizing and publicizing the massive antiregime protests in Iran in 2009 and Egypt in 2011, leading to government-imposed internet shutdowns in both cases, and contributing to the eventual ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The complete list of relevant examples is WEAVING A NEW ‘NET: A MESH-BASED SOLUTION 5 far longer; in countries ranging from China to Tunisia to Myanmar, political resistance and repression have moved from streets and cafes to mobile phones and laptops, and governments have devoted an ever greater number of resources to controlling and policing the flow of digital communications within and without their borders. In addition to its role in political struggle and change, the internet has also become central to the social, economic, and creative lives of billions of people around the world. A wealth of recent research (e.g., Deuze, 2006; Benkler, 2006; Coté & Pybus, 2007; Sinnreich, 2010; Baym, 2010) illustrates the growing importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in fostering cultural innovation, emerging markets, and a vibrant public sphere. Unfortunately, the challenges posed to online political speech and cultural innovation don’t end at America’s borders. Despite Secretary Clinton’s assertion that “on the spectrum of internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness,” American citizens face numerous threats to free speech and civil liberties online, from both governmental and commercial institutions. Infrastructure, Access, and Speech We cannot understand the operation of the internet without first understanding the commercial interests of the private companies that provide its infrastructure, and control access to that infrastructure (deNardis, 2010). There is almost a complete lack of competition between these companies; at present, 97 percent of American consumers are forced to chose between at most two broadband providers (Turner, 2009). As Lawrence E. Strickling (2010), administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), recently argued, “Broadband service providers have an incentive to use their control . . . to advantage their valueWEAVING A NEW ‘NET: A MESH-BASED SOLUTION 6 added services or to disadvantage competitive alternatives. In the absence of robust broadband competition, those providers may be able profitably to act on those incentives to the detriment of consumers and competition.” Consumers face a similar lack of choice in the wireless data market, an arena in which federal regulators possess even less power to exercise oversight. This lack of competition and effective regulation gives broadband and wireless providers a great deal of unchecked market power, which they have used, and have an incentive to continue using, in ways that undermine the ability of their customers to freely exchange information. In practice, we have already seen several instances of service providers exploiting this power to block communications for ideological, rather than purely profit-driven, motives. AT&T, for instance, has been criticized for censoring speech critical of President Bush during a live webcast (Marra, 2007). Similarly, Verizon Wireless has blocked text messages from NARAL, a pro-choice political group (Liptak, 2007). The consolidation of the Internet access business raises political concerns beyond these anticompetitive implications. It also contributes to an environment in which free speech is constrained by the federal government itself. One notable example is the NSA electronic surveillance program, a massive federal initiative to eavesdrop on the private communications of American citizens in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This program, which violated federal laws (ACLU, 2008), was only possible because the NSA was able to monitor the majority of communications by compelling a relatively small number of oligopolists to participate, presumably using federal regulatory power as leverage. 1 At the time of writing, AT&T has just announced its plans to acquire T-Mobile, potentially bringing the number of major American wireless data service providers from 4 to 3. WEAVING A NEW ‘NET: A MESH-BASED SOLUTION 7 Of course, most governmental threats to free speech online come from laws, treaties, and policies that have been introduced and/or ratified by Congress. Although this is not the place for an exhaustive survey, a short list of troubling examples includes the revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Stored Communications Act (SCA), the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Combating Online Trade Agreements and Copyrights Act (COICA), and the as-yet-unnamed “backdoor bill,” a law requested by the White House that would give the Department of Justice unilateral power to compel ISPs to censor entire domains from the American public. Understood collectively, these examples indicate that the emerging legislative consensus accords “e-speech” less protection than traditional channels and forums (Sinnreich & Zager, 2008). In addition to these concerns, Zittrain (2009) and Moglen (2010) have pointed to the ways in which the emerging “cloud” architecture also undermines democratic and participatory communications. The consolidation of capital and information within a set of centralized corporate servers leads to the complete disempowerment of the user, to a point where ownership of all networked data skews away from local computers toward a set of centralized, corporateowned servers. In Moglen’s words, the “dis-empowered client [is] at the edge and the server in the middle. [Information was stored] far from the human beings who controlled, or thought they controlled, the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives. This was a recipe for disaster.” Resistance and Reinvention The constraints on free speech and civil liberties we have mentioned have met with various forms of resistance over the years. From the beginning, as Turner (2006) relates, the internet’s WEAVING A NEW ‘NET: A MESH-BASED SOLUTION 8 military and hegemonic origins have been recast as an opportunity for democratic, or even utopian, sociopolitical action. From John Perry Barlow’s seminal 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” to today’s position papers and legal interventions by groups like Free Press, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Electronic Frontier Foundation (a group Barlow cofounded), there has been a consistent effort to define and preserve online free speech and civil liberties, and to develop an ethical and legal framework surrounding these issues. Similarly, we may understand the emergence of networked participatory culture (Banks & Humphreys, 2008), convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006), and configurable culture (Sinnreich, 2010), and the mass adoption of alternative communication protocols like peer-to-peer file sharing, as a largely nonideological form of resistance against the monopolization and privatization of communication. Although an individual mash-up or remix may not be positioned as a challenge to copyright law (or even produced with effective understanding of such laws), for instance, the collective interest in producing and sharing these emerging cultural forms by the billions indicates an emerging set of norms at odds with the increasingly draconian conditions under which cultural expression may legally occur. However, despite the prevalence and effectiveness of these forms of resistance, which are positioned in opposition to cultural regulation through commercial and legal means, the threats to civil liberties and free speech we have identified can ultimately be attributed to a network architecture that lends itself to exploitative and hegemonic ends. As Lessig (1999) has written so concisely, “code is law.” And, despite our ambitions of “internet freedom,” and the wealth of democratized cultural forms and breadth of political opinions currently flowering online, we believe these freedoms will continue to be undermined by a network architecture that WEAVING A NEW ‘NET: A MESH-BASED SOLUTION 9 fundamentally privileges centralized control over collective deliberation. If power corrupts, as Lord Acton’s oft-quoted phrase suggests, then absolute power over global communications will inevitably corrupt the public sphere and undermine the democratic process. Thus, we propose that the best way to vouchsafe civil liberties in the networked age is through an architectural intervention. The internet’s infrastructure must be fundamentally reimagined if it is to serve as an effective platform for democracy. Though the benefits of hierarchical DNS regimes and long-distance terrestrial backbone infrastructure are clear from an engineering standpoint, they also may be at odds with the same political values they were ostensibly built to serve (Mueller, 2002). Not only does the current architecture place the United States in an exceptional and politically unsustainable role as global regulator, it also allows for the interests of consolidated capital to be furthered above all else. In the interest of promoting civil liberties in a democratic society, our network architecture must encourage free, unregulated speech (Balkin, 2004, p. 49). To guide ourselves and others in understanding what a reimagined networked architecture would require if free speech and civil liberties are to be prioritized above all other considerations, we have developed a set of 10 “social specifications.” Our hope is that these may be understood as fundamental principles informing the development and deployment of nextgeneration networking technologies. Below, we will describe our own solution to these challenges, in the form of an ad hoc, wireless mesh network called MondoNet. 10 Social Specifications for a Democratized Network