Journal: The Underground Internet

There has been a lot of talk in the recent years about surveillance, particularly with warrant-less wiretapping and the submission of ISPs to the federal heel. There exist privacy networks, decentralized, like the Tor network. There must be a way to create a decentralized shadow-net, to avoid the large corporate complicity that threatens most of the average users.

I'm not a software-engineer, not an EECS major, and have no inside knowledge of the workings of ISP systems. But what I see as the free, democratized, ultimately liberated internet could be realized by this kind of means. Personal servers, routers, and bandwidth could be used to route traffic, encrypted, through a non-corporate controlled medium. I see this as feasible on localized scales, but seeing nationwide systems of this kind that I see in my mind's eye would take a powerful movement indeed.

What I see is the use of wireless relays to substitute the hard-wire lines as much as possible. Logistically this is ridiculous, and there would have to be extreme circumstances for this to become sufficiently desirable to overcome the practical issues. But if it had to be done, it is possible, cheap (relative to laying new wire), and decentralize-able. Each node would have either dishes, for discreet transmissions, or antennae for broadcast bandwith distribution, and would provide connectivity to a small neighborhood. By broadcasting the local networks on a short-distance, the use and therefore costs would be small enough to be a) manageable by one or two individuals, b) largely unnoticed by authorities. Ideally thousands of these small nodes would be connected via direct (preferably wireless) links, of various kinds, from a few hundred feet of fiber-optic, to line-of-sight laser relays, to pirate-radio frequencies, to focused dish-to-dish transmission. Whatever. In effect creating a network in which the administrators would only have to be connected to the few nearby admins, cooperating on a small scale, with a collaborative encryption and networking protocol for the larger network.

This network could function largely autonomously, with easy rerouting should any particular node be taken down. Updates could be generated on one locality and propagated via personal admin-admin contacts. However, to prevent the inevitable malicious use of the network, there would have to be considerable external pressures (i.e. government) pressures to form more camaraderie amongst admins, with the focus on a Heinlein-esque concept of "The Roads Must Roll"- that is, that the function of their work is essential to the community or nation. With a great sense of pride, goodwill, and a form of patriotism, abuse will be viewed as the ultimate evil in the scope of the network, and culturally discouraged.

In the event of individual admins being coopted by government, they can merely be excluded in the peer-peer propagation of encryption updates and hardware support. That makes it no easier to detect the security leak, but I'm certain the implementers would have a cleverer way to go about it that I ever would. Ideally the networks would have some power by the time they expanded large enough to catch the attention of the censors, and would be able to resist a systematic shutdown attempt. Besides that, a sure-fire crackdown would have to involve an inordinate number of arrest/confiscations due to the vast number of node administrators, yielding a public relations disaster.

Save this for your draconian-Orwellian future. Or Great Britain. Whichever.