There was a heated exchange on the BAWUG list last week, after some war protesters asked the group for some temporary Internet support for a demonstration.
I was mildly surprised there were a number of posts toward the 'republican' end of the scale. That is troubling, when you consider the future battle that is inevitable, between Owner-operated wireless cloud and the hierarchic, government regulated, controlled/manageable static routed Internet. There isn't really any debate in the US or anywhere els on the planet, whether the rule of law is legitimate, or scope of national security and police activities. All of our fellow citizens seem united, that Laws should exist and Police should enforce them... and governments should maintain armies and use them when they see fit. Now, the problem is that law enforcement has grown increasingly fond of surveilling and at times controlling information. Block, manipulate, surveil on the hierarchic Internet, with all the commercial NAPs, telcos, cablecos just as they have for 100 years controlled that other key information, the ledger at the bank. Those activities simply aren't possible if owner-sovereign P2P network succeeds. Any truly owner-sovereign network enables peer to peer payments, for example. Brings the whole cyphernomicon within reach, http://munitions.vipul.net/documents/cyphernomicon/chapter3/3.4.html or my goals which are just economic goals, http://www.gldialtone.com/whyP2Pwireless.htm It is quite evident the wireless communities around the country, and including BAWUG, all have some conservative elements. These are technical groups afterall, and Engineers have always been more to the right in politics. No doubt, those people are generally aware of the implication of any real P2P network. No doubt, in a variety of situations their comments and activities will want to install points of control. At the very least, most developers do not include among their goals, the much more difficult task of avoiding points of control, surveillance, or economic capture in the wireless architecture. Do you see that the political leanings of a group are always going to manifest in its objectives? And eventually, its technical designs, use cases, etc? -TOdd BOyle www.gldialtone.com -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
