Alternate Internet

A recent article in The Chronicle, "Fear of Repression Spurs Scholars and Activists to Build Alternate Internets", describes a movement (primarily of professors and IT professionals) to build alternate internet and social networks, in the event that a repressive government elects to block access to the current internet by its citizens. As I read the article, I kept thinking...'really, do these apparently well-educated people really believe that we are at risk in the U.S. of having the government step in and shut down the internet?'

The one fairly eye-opening piece of the article was the recounting of an experience by a University of Wisconsin History professor, Mr. William Cronon. Mr. Cronon wrote a blog where he "examined the role of conservative advocacy groups have played in formulating legislation recently proposed by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers". Following his blog post, the Republican Party of Wisconsin sent an open records request asking for emails to / from Mr. Cronon's state e-mail account related to certain key words (things like Republican, rally, union, names of certain Republican lawmakers, etc.). The professor believes that the open records request was an attempt to find evidence that he had used his state e-mail for partisan political purposes, which would be a violation of state law.

I am the student information system security officer at my institution and I have made the statement, "all of the equiment you are using is state equipment and shall be used for official state business only" to new employees more times than I can count. Not until reading this article and really seeing how someone, especially someone in higher education whose purpose (at least in part) may be to bring topical and sometimes controversial subjects up and have free discourse about them, did the gravity of who controls the exchange of information hit me.

This situation in Wisconsin has become a great marketing tool for a law professor at Columbia Law School, Mr. Eben Moglen, who has built a device called the Freedom Box that scrambles digital data. This scrambling of the data makes it much more difficulty for people to intercept.

While I don't believe that we risk having the traditional internet shut down by government, it's possible that risk is likely more real that I am really willing to believe at the moment, that there are people in the world who would like nothing better than obtain information sent between two people and use it for not-so-good purposes.

The article also describes how people in the movement are concerned because they believe that the internet has become more about marketing for large companies and less about connecting people. If you believe that the internet has indeed become a tool for commerce and not personal connection. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Neither good nor bad...but just what is? I guess that would all depend on your belief of what the internet was designed for in the first place. Personally, I believe the activity that occurs on the internet is simply a reflection of the activitiy that occurs in the average everyday life...there are connections with other people, there is research, there is commerce, there is invention, there is religion / spirituality, there is education, there is work, and there is sport / leisure. One nice thing the internet has the regular life doesn't...is my ability to simply close a window on any one of those things when I'm done with it at that point in time. Oh...and I'll take one Freedom Box please :-).