--- begin forwarded text
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 01:50:38 -0400
To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth
The long version of the Wired Story on Ryan Lackey, including lots more
about Tyler Wagner, who I've been reading about almost since he got there
after the liberation :-) in 2003...
Just bumped into the bit below, having abandoned Tyler and Jayme's LJs
after they split, and finding the link after they went back recently.
Meanwhile, the author bought the wrong vowel, apparently. ;-).
Cheers,
RAH
--
http://www.rezendi.com/travels/.html
Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth:
a tale of two California cipherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their
fortune, and bring the Internet to Iraq.
Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed
helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in
hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing
this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's
transactions drug deals - but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From
his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base
fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most
surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.
Getting to Anaconda is no joke. Incoming airplanes make a 'tactical
descent' landing, better known to military cognoscenti as the 'death
spiral'; a nose-down plummet, followed by a viciously tight 360-degree
turn, then another stomach-wrenching dive. The plane is dragged back to
level only just in time to land, and brakes so hard that anything not
strapped down goes flying forward. Welcome to Mortaritaville - the
airbase's mordant nickname, thanks to the insurgent mortars that hit the
base daily.
From above, the base looks like a child's sandbox full of thousands of
military toys. Dozens of helicopters litter the runways: Apaches,
Blackhawks, Chinooks. F-16 fighters and C-17 cargo planes perch in huge
igloo-like hangars built by Saddam. The roads are full of Humvees and
armored personnel carriers. Rows of gunboats rest inexplicably on arid
desert. A specific Act of Congress is required to build a permanent
building on any US military base, so Anaconda is full of tents the size of
football fields, temporary only in name, that look like giant caterpillars.
Its 25,000 inhabitants, soldiers and civilian contractors like Ryan, are
housed in tent cities and huge fields of trailers.
Ryan came to Iraq in July 2004 to work for ServiceSat International, hired
sight unseen by their CTO Tyler Wagner. Three months later, Ryan quit and
founded Blue Iraq. He left few friends behind. I think if Ryan had
stayed, Tyler says drily, the staff would have sold him to the
insurgents.
- - -
Iraq is new to the Internet. Thanks to sanctions and Saddam, ordinary
citizens had no access until 1999. Prewar, there were a mere 1.1 million
telephone lines in this nation of 26 million people, and fewer than 75 Net
cafés, connecting via a censored satellite connection. Then the American
invasion knocked nearly half of Baghdad's landlines out of service, and the
local exchanges that survived could not connect to one another.
After the invasion, an army of contractors flooded into Baghdad. Billions
of reconstruction dollars were being handed out in cash, and everybody -
local Internet cafés, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, the US military itself -
wanted Internet access. With the landline service destroyed by war, and
sabotage a continuing problem, satellite access was the only realistic
option. Among the companies vying to provide this access in early 2003,
scant months after the invasion, was ServiceSat International. SSI, a
startup founded by Kurdish expats, needed an American CTO: partly to import
America's culture of technical excellence, partly to help deal with Western
clients and authorities. They called Tyler Wagner. He was 25 years old.
- - -
San Francisco, aka Baghdad-by-the-Bay, July 2003. Tyler Wagner is a typical
counterculture California techie: a Cal Poly CS graduate, part of the
California punk scene, working for Greenpeace as a network engineer. Then
an old friend in London recommends him to SSI. They call him. They need a
capable Westerner willing to move to Iraq. Is he interested?
When he hangs up the phone, Tyler is shaking with excitement. The risks of
relocating to a war zone are obvious. But it is a lucrative senior
management position, offered to a man only two years out of university.
Life doesn't often offer you a hand up like that, he reminisces two years
later, and when it does, you can't afford to turn it down. One big
complication: Tyler's girlfriend, Jayme. They have been dating only six
months. He doesn't want to lose her. He calls and tells her the news - and
they both ask at the same time if she can come
