A really great front page New York Times article on the work we've been doing at the Open Technology Initiative. The full article is available here:

U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.

The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”

Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

“The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate,” Mr. Meinrath added.

The Invisible Web

In an anonymous office building on L Street in Washington, four unlikely State Department contractors sat around a table. Josh King, sporting multiple ear piercings and a studded leather wristband, taught himself programming while working as a barista. Thomas Gideon was an accomplished hacker. Dan Meredith, a bicycle polo enthusiast, helped companies protect their digital secrets.

Then there was Mr. Meinrath, wearing a tie as the dean of the group at age 37. He has a master’s degree in psychology and helped set up wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.

The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.

Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.

The project will also rely on the innovations of independent Internet and telecommunications developers.

“The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily control it,” said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert whose work will be used in the suitcase project. Mr. Kaplan has set up a functioning mesh network in Vienna and says related systems have operated in Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Mr. Meinrath said his team was focused on fitting the system into the bland-looking suitcase and making it simple to implement — by, say, using “pictograms” in the how-to manual.

In addition to the Obama administration’s initiatives, there are almost a dozen independent ventures that also aim to make it possible for unskilled users to employ existing devices like laptops or smartphones to build a wireless network. One mesh network was created around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial, said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation-technology researcher from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most “circumvention” technologies — the software legerdemain that helps dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks — nearly useless, he said.

“No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.”

That need is so urgent, citizens are finding their own ways to set up rudimentary networks. Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian expatriate and technology developer who co-founded a popular Persian-language Web site, estimates that nearly half the people who visit the site from inside Iran share files using Bluetooth — which is best known in the West for running wireless headsets and the like. In more closed societies, however, Bluetooth is used to discreetly beam information — a video, an electronic business card — directly from one cellphone to another.

Mr. Yahyanejad said he and his research colleagues were also slated to receive State Department financing for a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens. The system would be more limited than the suitcase but would only require the software modification on ordinary phones.

By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies, according to department figures.

Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.

That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

Shadow Cellphone System

In February 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke and Lt. Gen. John R. Allen were taking a helicopter tour over southern Afghanistan and getting a panoramic view of the cellphone towers dotting the remote countryside, according to two officials on the flight. By then, millions of Afghans were using cellphones, compared with a few thousand after the 2001 invasion. Towers built by private companies had sprung up across the country. The United States had promoted the network as a way to cultivate good will and encourage local businesses in a country that in other ways looked as if it had not changed much in centuries.

There was just one problem, General Allen told Mr. Holbrooke, who only weeks before had been appointed special envoy to the region. With a combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the towers, the Taliban was able to shut down the main network in the countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.

The Pentagon and State Department were soon collaborating on the project to build a “shadow” cellphone system in a country where repressive forces exert control over the official network.

Details of the network, which the military named the Palisades project, are scarce, but current and former military and civilian officials said it relied in part on cell towers placed on protected American bases. A large tower on the Kandahar air base serves as a base station or data collection point for the network, officials said.

A senior United States official said the towers were close to being up and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911 system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone.

By shutting down cellphone service, the Taliban had found a potent strategic tool in its asymmetric battle with American and Afghan security forces.

The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering. And the ability to silence the network was also a powerful reminder to the local populace that the Taliban retained control over some of the most vital organs of the nation.

When asked about the system, Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the American-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, would only confirm the existence of a project to create what he called an “expeditionary cellular communication service” in Afghanistan. He said the project was being carried out in collaboration with the Afghan government in order to “restore 24/7 cellular access.”

“As of yet the program is not fully operational, so it would be premature to go into details,” Colonel Dorrian said.

Colonel Dorrian declined to release cost figures. Estimates by United States military and civilian officials ranged widely, from $50 million to $250 million. A senior official said that Afghan officials, who anticipate taking over American bases when troops pull out, have insisted on an elaborate system. “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan, which is pretty expensive,” the official said.

Broad Subversive Effort

In May 2009, a North Korean defector named Kim met with officials at the American Consulate in Shenyang, a Chinese city about 120 miles from North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable. Officials wanted to know how Mr. Kim, who was active in smuggling others out of the country, communicated across the border. “Kim would not go into much detail,” the cable says, but did mention the burying of Chinese cellphones “on hillsides for people to dig up at night.” Mr. Kim said Dandong, China, and the surrounding Jilin Province “were natural gathering points for cross-border cellphone communication and for meeting sources.” The cellphones are able to pick up signals from towers in China, said Libby Liu, head of Radio Free Asia, the United States-financed broadcaster, who confirmed their existence and said her organization uses the calls to collect information for broadcasts as well.

The effort, in what is perhaps the world’s most closed nation, suggests just how many independent actors are involved in the subversive efforts. From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication.

In a chat with a Times reporter via Facebook, Malik Ibrahim Sahad, the son of Libyan dissidents who largely grew up in suburban Virginia, said he was tapping into the Internet using a commercial satellite connection in Benghazi. “Internet is in dire need here. The people are cut off in that respect,” wrote Mr. Sahad, who had never been to Libya before the uprising and is now working in support of rebel authorities. Even so, he said, “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”

Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Andrew W. Lehren from New York, and Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Today's interview (along with Susan Crawford) in Marketplace Tech Report here's the background and synopsis along with link so you can listen to the radio feed:

Election Day is tomorrow. By all indications we're going to be getting a very different, much more Republican Congress this time around. But before they come in, let's remember one of the last things the old, more Democratic Congress did. Or attempted to do, unsuccessfully.

By that, I mean net neutrality, the idea that Internet providers should be prevented from giving some Internet traffic priority over other Internet traffic. So if your provider decided you would get videos from YouTube really fast but websites from somewhere else really slow, they would be legally prohibited from doing so.

We talk to Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, and Susan Crawford, professor at Cardozo Law School in New York. They say not to expect much to come out of Congress this time either but that the ball has been placed clearly in the court of the Federal Communications Commission.

Late this year or possibly early next year, FCC Chairman will likely assert his agency's authority over internet communications. From there it's a question of whether whatever they do holds up in court.

Also in this show, a new software program lets employees of a company know where all their co-workers are physically located at all times. Which comes as a relief to people who hate privacy and never want to be left alone.

I'm hosting an exciting event today over at the New America Foundation -- if you can't make it in person, you can watch the stream live online:

The Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation will host Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski on February 24, 2010 at 11am. Chairman Genachowski will preview working recommendations in the National Broadband Plan for advancing U.S. mobile broadband leadership.

Recognizing the importance of broadband for ensuring America’s economic development and leadership, Congress and the President tasked the FCC with developing a National Broadband Plan to connect all Americans to affordable, world-class, high-speed Internet. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan, which the agency will deliver to Congress on March 17, 2010, will create jobs and spur economic growth; unleash new waves of innovation and investment; and improve education, health care, energy efficiency, public safety, and the vibrancy of our democracy.

Chairman Genachowski will preview working recommendations for spectrum reforms incorporated into the National Broadband Plan. A distinguished panel of industry representatives and the public interest advocates will respond to these proposals.

This event will be webcast live, and questions will be taken via Twitter. Send your question or comment to @newamerica with the hashtag of #NAFevents.

Welcome
Steve Coll
President, New America Foundation

Keynote
Julius Genachowski
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission

Moderator
Sascha Meinrath
Director, Open Technology Initiative
New America Foundation

Panelists
Ben Scott
Policy Director, Free Press

Chris Guttman-McCabe
Vice President, Regulatory Affairs
CTIA-The Wireless Association

Julie Kearney
Vice President for Regulatory Affairs
Consumer Electronics Association

Matt Wood
Associate Director, Media Access Project

Here's a fun article from the upcoming issue of IEEE Spectrum. Interestingly enough, while here at the eComm Conference here in Amsterdam, I'm working with my friend, Aaron Kaplan, on some of the newest open source community wireless mesh software and will be bringing home a mesh-in-a-box to deploy in my own back yard.

Netbooks Are Only Part of The Solution

POSTED BY: Tekla Perry // Wed, October 28, 2009

Netbooks are going to be huge, much bigger than they already are. Trust me on this. I say this not because I see more and more people working on them in cafes instead of on standard laptops—though I do. It’s not because I particularly want one—though for short trips I can see the appeal. It’s not because on a recent multifamily vacation one family showed up with one netbook per child.

It’s because my 70-something aunt, the one with the 30-year-old radio that you can only turn off by pulling the plug, and the TV that gets its signal from a 50-plus-year-old two-wire cable, just told me she’s thinking of getting a netbook.

Oh, it’ll be a couple of years before she actually makes the purchase, but the fact that she’s evening considering it is huge. The appeal for her is the cost, for sure—if it turns out to be a mistake, it won’t be a huge mistake. But what also is drawing her is also the fact that netbooks don’t look all that high tech. They don’t take up much room, they don’t have a lot of extra buttons on the keyboard, and they don’t do vast numbers of things she wouldn’t want to do anyway—like edit video or spend hours typing long documents.

But she has been thinking that it would be pretty cool to look up a fact she read somewhere but just can’t remember exactly, or check out a new medication prescribed by her doctor before she orders it.
And that’s enough usefulness to make her part with $250 or so. Once she gets one, I’ll show her how she can keep up with all her grandnieces and nephews on Facebook, and she’ll be set.

Unfortunately, much as I would have liked to, I didn’t run out that moment and get her a new netbook. Because there’s one piece of this puzzle missing—some kind of community wi-fi access. It doesn’t have to be free, it doesn’t have to be fast, but it has to be there; easy to get to at a reasonable price.

Forget dial-up—netbooks don’t even come with built-in modems, and these days the bells and whistle of most web sites mean dial up is just too slow to be viable. Cable modem or DSL would mean new wiring in her home (she’s got one corded wall phone right now, no other jacks), and a box that would have to be installed somewhere, set up, and occasionally rebooted. I can’t see convincing her to go through that hassle and expense.

But community wi-fi would be perfect. She’d need nothing but the netbook, the monthly fee would be reasonable, and, while likely slower than cable or DSL, it’d be moving plenty fast for her needs.
Which got me wondering—what happened to community wi-fi, anyway? I called Sascha Meinrath, research director of the New America Foundation’s wireless future program. He told me that it’s been going great in Europe, but in 2004 or 2005 got sidetracked in the U.S. “The rationale of community wireless, bringing low-cost or free wireless to the masses, got usurped by the corporate model,” he says, “how do we charge money for it.” And the corporations that cities contracted with to build low-cost systems didn’t have a lot of incentive to make those systems succeed, since they’d be competing with their own, higher cost internet access offerings. Earthlink, for example, last year shut down it’s community wireless systems in Philadelphia and New Orleans.

The good news, Meinrath told me, is that community wireless in the U.S. may be starting a new surge. He sees encouraging signs in the efforts of Meraki, a Google-backed startup that’s building low-cost wireless networks for companies, universities, and communities, and other low-cost efforts. He’s starting to see municipal and community groups who looked at community wireless in the past but got put off by the apparently high costs getting ready to take another look at it. And, he says, the $7.2 billion in stimulus funds targeted at increasing broadband access can only help; he’s hoping communities will spend that money on low-cost open source systems instead of expensive proprietary systems to make it go as far as possible.

Now back to my aunt. She still wants that netbook—with Internet access, but without a box in her house. Community wi-fi may be coming, but not soon enough. So I’m thinking, next time I’m visiting I’m going to boot up my laptop and see if I’m picking up any signals; if I am, I’ll go knock on a few doors and see if I can borrow a cup of broadband.

From: Federal News Radio:

Click here to listen to or download the interview. Here's more:

The U.S. is falling behind when it comes to broadband usage and access.

This is according to Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative.

Meinrath recently testified at the FCC Workshop on Next Generation Wireless Technology.

He told the Daily Debrief more about why broadband is so important, why the FCC should do what it can to make sure everyone has access to wireless communications, and what broadband could do for federal agencies in remote locations.

"The FCC now, having realized that we are rapidly losing pace with a growing number of other countries, has decided it is time for us to develop a national broadband policy to, in essence, help spur broadband connectivity across the whole country. So, this would mean both faster speeds and better services in places that are already served and doing the necessary infrastructure development to ensure that those that have been unserved or underserved around the country are actually provided this incredibly important, mission critical resource."

Until the late 1990's, the U.S. was the leader of Internet connectivity.

Ten years later, however, there has been a dramatic shift.

Customers in the United States now pay more for worse services, slower speeds and more limitations than other countries around the world.

The federal government is trying to change this, Meinrath said, with a number of different plans.

"On the one hand, we have this broadband stimulus . . . and that's $7.2 billion, which sounds like a whole money on the face of it, but on the other hand, it's a tiny fraction of what we actually need to be spending as a country to really catch up to other countries around the globe to make a competitive infrastructure for next generation, 21st century economies."

Meinrath used the example of Australia for perspective, which has invested $ 31 billion and has a significantly smaller population.

"The U.S., with $7.2 billion, is spending about $24 per capita and Australia is spending $1,400 per capita. So, all of a sudden one can see that the investment that we're making is really just the tip of the ice berg in terms of what we actually need to be putting into broadband infrastructure."

The problem of getting technology out to rural areas is not new.

Meinrath said the same arguments being used today for broadband access were used at the beginning of the 20th century when the telephone first came into use.

"Today, people look at broadband connectivity as, in some ways, a luxury, because they don't see all of the add-ons that it makes possible -- as a resource, atop which all sorts of commerce and . . . efficiencies are made possible. Unless you keep that holistic view of what broadband makes possible, you fail to really take into account the real meaningful implications and ramifications that broadband connectivity makes possible for everyone."

In today's world, there are also detriments for those who are not connected, Meinrath added.

"As more people get online, those that do not have access to that resource face increasingly insurmountable odds, at everyone from developing and getting out their applications for jobs to accessing resources online to paying their bills -- a whole variety of different things that we take for granted now."

The FCC recently started a blog and joined Twitter to better inform the public about the issues surrounding broadband capabilities.

As far as implementing those changes, Meinrath said he is cautiously optimistic that the FCC Is on the right path.

"I haven't yet seen the plan and I haven't yet seen the meaningful changes being implemented that clearly need to be done. . . . I am quite willing to hold people's toes to the fire to ensure that the changes that need to happen, happen."

Meinrath said that the next three to six months will set a trajectory for the next decade of policies and regulations having to do with broadband.

---

On the Web:


New America Foundation -- Prepared Testimony of Sascha Meinrath Before the FCC Wireless Technology Workshop

FCC -- broadband.gov

FCC on Twitter -- twitter.com/fccdotgov

(Copyright 2009 by FederalNewsRadio.com. All Rights Reserved.)

A bit late -- but have been slammed. I speak again on September 9th on the consumer issues panel. Should be a really interesting time of things:

Prepared Testimony of Sascha Meinrath Before the FCC Wireless Technology Workshop

By Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation
August 13, 2009

I work for a DC-based think tank - holding down the technology arm of the foundation's work.

The Open Technology Initiative formulates policy and regulatory reforms to support open architectures and open source innovations; and facilitate the development and implementation of open technologies and communications networks.

OTI promotes affordable, universal, and ubiquitous communications networks through partnerships with communities, researchers, industry, and public interest groups; and is committed to maximizing the potentials of innovative open technologies by studying their social and economic impacts - particularly for poor, rural, and other underserved constituencies.

***

Today we are living through a critical juncture in telecommunications history.

A trifecta of recent societal shifts are combining to create a "perfect storm" for advancing policies to better meet the needs of all U.S. residents.

• First, technological advances are creating a whole host of new platforms and hardware to better connect people, dramatically increasing the utility of communications tools.
• Second, consumers everywhere are clamoring for access to advanced services and new applications - driving multi-media production and information dissemination.
• Third, generational shifts amongst our country's key decision-makers are generating the potential for seismic changes in our country's regulatory environment.

Taken together, these factors should be driving a communications renaissanceakin to the introduction of the printing press, telephone, or the Internet itself.

Instead,what we are seeing is a systematic entrenchment of vested interests that are diligently:

1. working to prevent many of the most innovative technologies from ever seeing the light of day;
2. who are engaging in draconian attempts to limit media production and stifle information dissemination; and,
3. as Amy Schatz reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, launching unprecedented lobbying efforts to stagnate or prevent meaningful and much-needed reforms.

Here inside the Beltway, an epic battle is about to be waged between those seeking to create a participatory, distributed, and democratic digital public sphere and forces seeking to re-establish a command-and-control regime over next-generation telecommunications infrastructure.

As the populace shifts from wireline to mobile communications as theirconnectivity norm, wireless technologies are at the very heart of this battle.

Instead of building next-generation networks focused around lowering costs forconsumers and maximizing user control over the services and hardware we have bought, providers are architecting systems that maximize billable moments -commoditizing every new space and function possible.

Instead of fostering interconnectivity of networks and interoperability of devices, theforces of command-and-control seek new ways to capture market share and generate path dependencies to limit customer churn.

Handset exclusivity and the lockdown of cellular phones and PDAs are symptomatic of this business model; but so too are the myriad limitations we've already seen to prevent users from doing everything from streaming video, to Google Voice andSkype.

Historically,over the past 75 years, we have dramatically increased wireless capacity by opening up higher and higher frequencies as the technologies have made these bands viable. Allocations for new uses have paralleled these reforms.

However, assignments to license holders in years' past, being based upon the cutting edge technological capacities of their day, are remarkably in efficient by today's standards.

Today, cognitive and software defined radio technologies allows us to "in-fill"throughout the public airwaves - dynamically reusing empty or underutilized frequencies.

This opportunistic spectrum reuse - and its potential to dramatically decentralize and improve communications - is one of the most powerful tools available for breaking the current strangleholds we face over how we communicate.

Today's technological capabilities have far outstripped many current business practices- straining infrastructure that was built for the wrong purpose.

Tomorrow, this disruptive potential is certain to grow and - so long as current systems remain locked down and service provision fails to meet consumer needs - may achieve explosive proportions.

The question we must all face and answer, is "How do we transition to a moredistributed, participatory, democratic telecommunications system?"

After years of burying our head in the sand, a continuing failure to forthrightly address systematic shortcoming in our wireless communications infrastructure will dramatically increase the headaches (and economic costs) that we will eventually have to face.

Leadership from Congress, from private industry, and from the public interest sector is desperately needed to ensure that these necessary transitions are graceful instead of unmanageable and liberatory instead of harmful.

But most importantly, the onus lies with the FCC to ensure that the future of wireless communications lives up to its democratic potential.

The FCC, through incentives and regulatory fiat has the responsibility to ensure that the public airwaves serve, first and foremost, the best interest of the residents of the United States and leverage the capabilities of open hardwareand software; cognitive radio technologies; and peer-to-peer, distributed infrastructures.

I look forward to hearing how each of my co-panelists sees their company's rolein supporting this mandate and look forward to your questions.

Recently, Public Knowledge visited with the Open Technology Initiative to discuss some of our recent projects. Here's the quick 5-minute video they pulled together -- they wanted to interview me, but I pulled in a whole bunch of my staff. Lots of fun!

I got a surprise call from Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, yesterday evening that I'd been chosen by this year's judges for their IP3 award for "Internet Protocol". Very exciting stuff! You can swing by and hoist a pint in celebration at the October 15th award ceremony. More info is below:

Public Knowledge Presents Sixth IP3 Awards to Vaidhyanathan, Jackson, Meinrath

For Immediate Release:
August 4, 2009

Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn announced that three winners have been chosen for the 2009 IP3 awards. In addition, a special President’s Award will also be presented. The name of that winner has not yet been disclosed.

This year, the awards will be given to Siva Vaidhyanathan, Karen Jackson and Sascha Meinrath. Awards are given to individuals who over the past year (or over the course of their careers) who have advanced the public interest in one of the three areas of “IP” –Intellectual Property, Information Policy and Internet Protocol. The awards will be presented at a ceremony Oct. 15 in Washington, D.C.

Vaidhyanathan was recognized for his work in intellectual property. Now a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, Vaidhyanathan for a decade has been one of the leading academic advocates for a more balanced copyright policy. He is the author of two books, His first book, “Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity,” (New York University Press, 2001) and “The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System” (Basic Books, 2004), with a third scheduled for next year. He also has written numerous articles and appeared on TV making the case for access to information.

Jackson, the deputy secretary of technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, was recognized for her work in information policy. She was recognized for her work in making information available to local governments about how to bring broadband to their areas, and for leading the Commonwealth’s broadband mapping project using state resources to complete the task ahead of many other states. She has worked with government and industry to become one of the preeminent broadband advocates in the country.

Meinrath was recognized for his work in Internet protocol. He is the creator of the Open Technology Initiative (OTI) at the New America Foundation. OTI is dedicated to using the potential of innovative open technologies by studying their social and economic impact, providing in-depth, objective research, analysis, and findings. He was also a principal in creating the Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform designed to allow researchers to study traffic on the Internet. He also has a long history of building wireless community networks, and provides expertise on spectrum issues to the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition.

Judges for this year were:

Kenneth DeGraff, legislative director for Rep. Mike Doyle;

Parul Desai, vice president of the Media Access Project;

Jason Schultz, Acting Director, Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, UC Berkeley School of Law;

Jonathan Taplin, professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, and a member of the Public Knowledge Board of Directors.

IP3 winners in 2008 were Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press; Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.org. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) received the special President’s Award.

---

Public Knowledge is a public-interest advocacy and education organization that seeks to promote a balanced approach to intellectual property law and technology policy that reflects the “cultural bargain” intended by the framers of the constitution. More information available at: http://www.publicknowledge.org

About a half-decade ago I wrote up a piece for the Journal of Community Informatics, "Community Wireless Networking and Open Spectrum Usage: A Research Agenda to Support Progressive Policy Reform of the Public Airwaves". My focus was on spectrum policy, but the first key point I raised was valuable across the board -- to create a truly progressive telecommunications policy:

"First, identify major research that has already been conducted and impacted (or been cited) in regulatory/policy debates, as well as the independent research labs that are most active in contemporary spectrum research areas. This assessment would survey the literature that "counts" -- encompassing technical, economic, social, and other domains that should be taken into account and help inform contemporary regulatory/policy debates. This literature could then be used to help set the agenda for future policy debates."

Now fast forward to today's press release from the FCC (and which happens to be put out by my friend and colleague, Jen Howard, who just started her new gig at the FCC last week):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 14, 2009

NEWS MEDIA CONTACT
Jen Howard
(202) 418-0506
Jen.howard@fcc.gov

Harvard’s Berkman Center to Conduct Independent Review of Broadband Studies to Assist FCC

WASHINGTON – The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University will conduct an independent expert review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world. This project will help inform the FCC’s efforts in developing the National Broadband Plan.

“Advanced communications have the potential to enhance the lives of all Americans, improve public safety, create jobs, and support our economic recovery,” Chairman Julius Genachowski said. “As the Commission embarks on the important task of crafting a National Broadband Plan, better data will inform and animate the activities of the agency. The Berkman Center’s independent review of existing information will help lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decisionmaking. I appreciate the Berkman Center’s invaluable assistance and look forward to seeing the results.”

Yochai Benkler, the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said, “I am pleased that the Berkman Center can contribute positively to the process Chairman Genachowski has envisioned for developing a national broadband strategy by providing to the Commission, and thereby the public, the results of our compilation and assessment of the existing literature on this important and timely subject.”

“A comprehensive assessment of these plans will be enormously helpful given our short timetable,” said Blair Levin, who is coordinating the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Knowing what has already been learned will improve our ability to deliver the best possible National Broadband Plan.” Consistent with Chairman Genachowski’s recent public statements regarding an open and transparent National Broadband Plan process, the results of the Berkman Center review will be made publicly available.

Awesome!

I spent my morning yesterday on Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR) discussing the digital divide. It was a fun show (I always enjoy the call-in formats since listeners often bring up the best questions and comments). Here's more along with a link to the Where We Live show archive:

WWL: Closing the Digital Divide | Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network

The internet might have been born here in the US, but we’ve fallen behind much of the industrialized world when it comes to making sure everyone can access the web.  Non-white households, rural households, and low income households are still significantly less likely than wealthier, whiter, more urban populations to have fast, reliable internet at home. And that's a problem. Connectivity has consequences for the economy and for education, and increasingly, for democracy.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes $7.2 billion in stimulus funding for broadband deployment to under served areas—to be distributed by next summer. Many are calling this a golden opportunity to close the digital divide, a move towards internet access for all Americans. Coming up, Where We Live, a discussion with policy experts and activists.

How do we get affordable broadband into housing projects? Over mountain passes? Out to remote farms? And why does it matter? What do you think? Has internet access become more than a luxury…is it a right?

 
Related Content:
• Curtis Hill
• Wally Bowen
• Sascha Meinrath
Links for this Episode:
Open Technology Initiative at The New America Foundation
Mountain Area Information Network
Speed Matters
Concepts for Adaptive Learning
St. Cloud Florida-Cyber Spot