FreeDomTower Powers up after New York violence

2011-11-19T01:44:00.001-07:00

Protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City used to have enough resources to satisfy a small village: hot food, live entertainment, even a library. But this past week it has been violently torn down by the New York Police Department and many dozens arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. ... BUT something fundamentally vital has survived and is now THRIVING globally

Perhaps their most effective resource came from a recently installed nine-foot-high antennae pole known as the “Freedom Tower”,which until smashed into smithereens by the NYPD this Tower was usually stationed at the south west corner of Zucotti park.

Now many more Towers are currently being redesigned to be more portable, less fragile and run on car batteries charged by a bio-diesel generator. It’s all about obtaining absolutely free WiFi, but not quite as you know it.

“The movement is very much catalyzed and made possible by our newfound ability to communicate with each other directly,” says Isaac Wilder, who has camped at various Occupy Wall Street sites since September. “Rather than saying when you get home, ‘I was at the park today,’ they can say ‘hey, I am at Zuccotti park. Come join me virtually from anywhere in the world if you cannot join me physically in person.’”

Isaac Wilder and his friend Charles Wyble are the founders of The Free Network Foundation. In mid-October, they assembled two modems and six radio antennas to create the Freedom Tower, Occupy Wall Street’s public WiFi source. Their foundation has been paying about $80 each month in backhaul charges just to keep New York City’s resident protesters online. Their larger goal, however, is a far more globally ambitious one: creating a new kind of Internet3, with an off-the-grid component designed just for OWS.

As their work is nearly done, the pair have just created the world's first low cost, decentralized, peer-to-peer, true broadband network that provides discounted or free Internet access across the country, via what is known as a mesh network. Mesh networks connect multiple communications nodes to one Internet access point. Think peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as Bittorrent, but using physical connections. Many individual computers in the network can connect to the source — in this case the Internet access point — through connections with each other. In this way, many computers can share one access point.

Mesh networks are considered far more secure than traditional connections. Two computers connected to the same mesh network can communicate directly, instead of sending their messages via a remote server where it could theoretically be intercepted or blocked. Indeed, mesh networks have often been discussed as a way for demonstrators to keep their communications completely private and totally secure.

“Many people thought of a similar solution when the Internet was down in Egypt, during the January 2011 revolution,” says Terek Amr, a network architect who lives in Cairo. “But it remained just an idea.” In fact, he says, “people living near Tahrir square opened their access points for the demonstrators to use freely [though a network never materialized].”

Creating a national version of the peer-to-peer network, however, would take decades. Nothing near that scale has ever been accomplished using the technology. Wilder hopes that eventually enough Occupy Wall Street supporters will set up towers so that messages sent between sites can hop through network nodes rather than making the trip to a centralized server.

One day, hopes the Free Network Foundation, this network will cover the entire country and nobody will be required to send a message through an ISP. Essentially, this would allow participants — who would be sharing Internet access points — to buy Internet access at a bulk rate.

“If you become an ISP,” Wilder says, “you pay an ISP rate.”

Achieving nationwide discounted, decentralized Internet would be difficult. According to Wilder’s estimates, FNF would need to build about 70,000 towers across the entire United States before the network would be a viable form of communication. So far there are three since the fourth was destroyed at Occupy Wall Street, leaving the remaining ones at Occupy Austin, Occupy San Antonio and Occupy Los Angeles.

“We already have small scale examples of what they are willing to do, so technically it should be feasible,” Amir says. “I believe there will be many other obstacles such as legal or economical issues. For example, over there in Egypt, no one is allowed to cover public areas using WiFi without having a license from the government … mobile operators will sure lobby to ban such a thing, as it will directly harm their business.”

The Free Network Foundation, like the Occupy Wall Street Journal and OWS TV commercials, has started a crowdfunding campaign to help them chip away at their ambitious project. Their goal is $75,000, and they got a $10,000 head start as a prize at a recent social technology conference.

“It’s totally in an alpha phase,” Wilder says. “It’s still something we’re prototyping and still very much working on.”

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