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Mobile blogging: A superb essay from Justin Hall on how blogging (and informal reporting) combined with wireless networks (cell and LAN) are changing culture. He relies in part on Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs thesis, but pulls together many threads from the realms of blogging, journalism, and technology.
He manages to raise a point I thought Rheingold skipped in his book: it's all well and good to use cell networks to cause spontaneous protests, but what happens if the government simply shuts down the network or restricts it? This used to seem sort of laughable -- along the lines of who can shut down the Internet?
But with an increasing reliance on cell-based networks, all of which are owned by enormous national or multinational firms, a little pressure from, say, an Admiral Poindexter, could have turned the Battle in Seattle into the Battle for Cell Dial Tone.
The growing use of Wi-Fi wireless networks could help forestall the dominance of cell companies, where a few hands owning all means of signal distribution could strangle dissemination. Because many intentional or unintentional Wi-Fi networks use cable and DSL modems, or, increasingly, relay traffic from other locations, the government would have to try to shut down all Internet access to disable communications.
In some cases, this might mean having to shut down links in cities 20 to 40 miles away, or disable satellite Internet communications. True, the FCC limits on unlicensed spectrum power limits prevent extremely long links, but I can't imagine activists, finding their local voice cut off, wouldn't turn on a little more wattage to reach the next hop of connectivity for temporary links -- and from that next hop to another and another if necessary. To paraphrase an old protest cry: The whole wireless world is watching!
To extrapolate only slightly, once Voice over IP (VOIP) phones are cheaply available to work over any Wi-Fi network in the next two years (or maybe next few months), and with embeded Jabber instant-messaging clients in the same device, we stop having to rely on cell data networks except for ubiquity and, perhaps, a predictable cost. (Cell companies aren't stupid: they certainly are testing the practicality of such devices now, as it would allow them to shift traffic off overloaded cell towers.)
Privacy-conscious consumers and activists would almost certainly switch to using community networks that would route their call via an encrypted end-to-end transport to an overseas switch that would anonymize their call before feeding it back into the publicly switched telephone network.
As we find that the options for unfettered expression of free speech are further and further constrained -- protest-free zones, pre-emptive arrests, prior restraint -- wireless networks emerge as one of the Weapons of Mass Dissemination in the arsenal of democracy.