The Net Goes Local

摘要

When the soon-to-be-defunct government of president Hosni Mubarak shut off Egypt's Internet early on the morning of January 28, 2011, it proved the U.S. State Department's working theory: that the arc of history bends toward democracy, but it needs Internet access to get there. One project meant to ensure what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls "the freedom to connect" is an "Internet-in-a-suitcase," a kit of wireless routers and software that could be smuggled into an authoritarian country and allow revolutionaries to set up their own local area network (LAN) on the fly. Its developers at the public policy institute the New America Foundation call the concept "device as infrastructure," a platform that operates on its own, without requiring a connection to the broader Internet. By avoiding the traditional phone-company cables-and, in the process, a connection to the backbone of the Internet-this ad hoc network would be extremely difficult to monitor or shut down.