Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  NYCWireless members realized that Bryant Park would be a perfect place for an experiment in designing public communication infrastructure in “ways that help drive community formation,” Townsend told me. Outdoor movies in the summer draw thousands of people. During the daytime in pleasant weather, workers from nearby offices bring their laptops and cell phones and work in the park. NYCWireless, in partnership with the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, is launching free wireless broadband in the park and designing opt-in “buddy lists” that would enable local people to know when their friends are logged in from the park.

  NYCWireless was part of an application for an Urban Empowerment Zone grant to bring wireless broadband and computers to low-income neighborhoods in Yonkers.23 Townsend sees wireless networks, whether they are financed as cooperatives, nonprofits, or commercial enterprises, as opportunities to “learn how to use technology to create new connections between people, instead of isolating them.”24 NYCWireless is building alliances with community groups and developing an infrastructure “built around certain core values: community oriented, low barrier to entry, privacy conscious and secure, utilize social contract and social expectations, and provide common ground for interactions.”25 Mark Schultz, a senior associate of law firm Baker and McKenzie who works on legal issues pro bono for NYCWireless, says, “You have to wonder whether it’s going to be part of the infrastructure of the future, just like the streets or the electricity or the sewers and everything else. Whether Internet access is something we’re all just going to have ubiquitous access to. That would be cool. And this may be a first step to that.”26

  After September 11, WiFi performed a service nobody had anticipated. For weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, businesses in lower Manhattan lacked Internet access, due to the massive destruction of both wired and wireless infrastructure. Then people like Nathaniel Freitas at a company called ThinAirApps started seeking alternatives.27 Freitas looked out his office window, saw the logo of a dotcom that had recently gone out of business, and out of desperation, sent email to an address listed on the dotcom’s Web site. Tristan Stoner, a VP at INTV, the company that had purchased the defunct dotcom’s access, offered to share INTV’s working business-grade connection. They set up a line of sight WiFi connection, and Freitas’s fifty employees were back online. Around the same time, NYCWireless was contacted by Blink.com, another company that had lost Internet access. Townsend posted a plea online and received permission to put an antenna up on a neighborhood building that housed a small Internet Service Provider (ISP). Ricochet, a wireless modem network that had been shut down when its owner, Metricom, filed for bankruptcy protection, temporarily reactivated its network for the use of emergency workers near ground zero.

  In the San Francisco Bay Area, a resource center and interest group for wireless activists grew out of PlayaNet—instant broadband infrastructure for a temporary autonomous zone in the middle of nowhere.28 Every year, 25,000 dionysiac technogeeks gather for a collective art ritual in the Nevada desert, the Burning Man festival, constituting the fifth-largest city in Nevada for a week.29 Burning Man has dozens of radio stations and its own WiFi network, one of the earliest. PlayaNet gave birth to the Bay Area Wireless Users Group (BAWUG), which maintains a mailing list of over a thousand and sponsors monthly meetings. BAWUG member Cliff Skolnick publishes a map of voluntarily open WiFi networks in the San Francisco area (which is how I discovered that p2p maven Cory Doctorow had moved from Toronto). According to Doctorow, “BAWUG’s online how-to is the wireless guerrilla’s bible.”30 SFLan’s manifesto proclaims: “Imagine a citywide wireless LAN that grows from anarchistic cooperation.”31

  When I started getting up to speed on the WiFi movement, I paid a visit to Tim Pozar, whom I had known since the days he was involved in connecting the grassroots computer bulletin board network Fidonet to the Internet. One of the founders of BAWUG, Pozar is planning what he calls a “Neighborhood Area Network” that could cover a large part of the San Francisco Bay Area; Pozar and his “Sunset Network” colleagues are quietly obtaining rights to place $2,000 high-quality wireless access points on San Francisco hilltops.32 Directional antennae for longer-range WiFi, it turns out, can be made easily with the right kind of Pringles potato chip can.33

  Tool-sharing, the fundamental principle of the original ethical hackers, is one of the ways grassroots groups accelerate growth of the movement. Internet technology publisher and conference organizer O’Reilly Associates maintains an online cookbook and published a book on Building Wireless Community Networks.34 The NoCat Community Wireless Network Project in Sonoma County, California, is creating a Linux program and open source “centralized authentication code” that will make it easy for a member of one wireless cooperative to seamlessly use another network’s bandwidth. Personal Telco Project in Portland, Oregon, proclaims: “By creating, packaging, and disseminating Open Source tools, documentation, and community support, we are building citywide networks which are open to, and maintained by, the public.”35

  WiFi might thrive as a commercial industry. Sky Dayton, who founded the third most successful ISP, EarthLink, at age twenty-two, announced in December 2001 that he was starting a new business named “Boingo.”36 Boingo bootstrapped itself by aggregating more than 400 existing hotspots. Boingo provides access to any subscribers of those hotspots who pay up to $75 per month, and Boingo shares the revenues with the ISPs. Dayton is aiming for 5,000 hotspots by the end of 2002. Korea Telecom is planning to roll out 10,000 WiFi Hotspots, and in Japan, one service, WIS-net, signed up 9,000 subscribers the first month.37 Other wireless ISP aggregators have followed. A report commissioned by IBM in 2002 predicted that the number of North American hotspots will grow to 151,000 sites by 2008.38

  Whether or not wireless Internet access becomes a profitable business, the success of WiFi as a tool within industries was assured when Federal Express Corporation started equipping its delivery fleet with WiFi networks that transmit encrypted broadband data when a truck nears a terminal and senses a hotspot.39 UPS is also deploying 802.11b wireless LANs in all its distribution centers worldwide.40 Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld’s mobile computing pundit, forecast in December 2001 that “as WiFi gets incorporated into corporate networks, gets deployed in public places, and even becomes part of the design and construction of new homes, VOIP (voice over IP) will become the killer app that closes the deal for WiFi installation.”41 Any lingering doubts that some form of 802.11b would not break out of the homebrew freemasonry were erased when Bill Gates made this pronouncement at a Microsoft developer’s conference: “Microsoft expects 802.11b and its supersets to be present in most places that people spend time. In corporate offices it will be pervasive. In campuses, hotels, convention centers, airports, shopping centers; virtually everywhere this 11 megabit and up capability will be there.”42

  WiFi technology and its regulation have problems, serious ones, that must be overcome if it is to break out of the homebrew hobbyist world and become a mass medium. The fact that my friend could download streaming video in the atrium of San Francisco office buildings highlights one of the barriers to commercial WiFi success. So many businesses have installed unsecured, wide-open wireless networks that the name “war driving” has been adopted to describe the practice of roaming with a laptop and antenna in search of open networks (the name comes from “war dialing,” a hacker practice of dialing random numbers in search of unsecured dial-up systems).43 Computer security consultant Peter Shipley identified eighty open networks by driving around downtown San Francisco for an hour.44 A member of NYCWireless found 1,400 open networks in a portion of midtown Manhattan.45 Not only are such networks open to “borrowing” or monitoring by unauthorized users, but the confidential information communicated on those networks is crackable, too. Data communications security implemented in the first versions of WiFi software was proven insecure in 2001; software available on the Internet named “AirSnort” made it possible even for technical novices to engage in “wh
acking”—wireless hacking.46

  Grassroots networks face another barrier. Users who share their Internet connectivity might be violating the user’s agreement with their provider. “This would be akin to stealing cable,” said an AT&T Broadband representative, and sharing a Time-Warner cable Internet account through WiFi “would be a violation of the agreement . . . and might subject that customer to federal and state penalties,” said a Time-Warner representative. 47 However, one hundred people can share a commercial-grade Internet connection and divide the cost among themselves. NYCWireless and others work with upstream providers who are happy to sell them high-speed Internet access for redistribution. The very inexpensive lunch comes in with the dramatically lower costs of redistributing bandwidth once it is available from the upstream service provider. It’s as if the telephone wires between your local telephone switching center and your home became obsolete.

  Electromagnetic frequency interference is another technical matter that carries political consequences. When the United States began regulating radio, the radio receivers of the time lacked the capabilities available today. If two broadcasters in the same region use frequencies that are close together, receivers have trouble distinguishing the two broadcasters. Careful regulation of radio and television broadcasters was necessary to make sure that no more than one had a license to broadcast at a given frequency in a geographic region. However, the entire basis of frequency regulation was called into question when “smart radios” came along and suddenly millions of broadcasters became possible in the space where only one could exist before. (More about this technology in a minute.) Another barrier to WiFi (and one that the 3G interests are likely to use against it) is that under FCC regulations, the modification of unlicensed equipment (like adding a Pringles can) is illegal.

  Finally, one key public health matter that WiFi designers must address if the technology is to be widely adopted is radio frequency radiation. The radios operate on the same frequencies as microwave ovens, and a powerful access point emits as much radiation, within one or two feet, as a microwave oven.48

  WiFi security, radiation, and interference problems might be solvable, or WiFi might be a dead end or transitional technology. In any case, the companies that paid $150 billion for licenses to use the spectrum in the old way are not strongly motivated to come up with an entirely new way to allocate spectrum. Technical and regulatory barriers have one weakness, however: They attract people who like to break through barriers.

  Tonga, Mongolia, the Rez, and Wales: The New Electronic Frontiers

  Colonel Dave Hughes, USA, Ret., is the only character who has popped up in the plot every time I’ve investigated the roots of a technology revolution. In 1983, exploring the brave new world of the 300 bit per second modem, I encountered him on the Source, a pre-Internet online meeting place. A West Point graduate who had commanded combat troops in Korea and Vietnam, Hughes retired to Colorado and became fired up about the democratic potential of personal computers and modems.49 In 1992, when I was documenting the world of virtual communities, I learned that Hughes was introducing the Internet to Indian reservations and the Big Sky Telegraph system in rural Montana, so I made a pilgrimage to Hughes’s Internet-equipped booth in Rogers’ Bar in Old Colorado City to interview him.50 I have seen Dave Hughes a dozen times, and I’ve never seen him without his Stetson. He has a twinkle in his eye and a wicked grin when you see him face to face, but otherwise, Hughes is as take-no-prisoners pugnacious offline as he is notorious for being online. I offer these details in support of my suspicion that if anyone can mount a frontal assault on or outflank the FCC, it’s Hughes.

  In 2002, I learned that Hughes was involved in wireless broadband on Indian reservations, in Mongolia, and in Wales. In a documented and thoroughly public scheme with wireless activist and entrepreneur Dewayne Hendricks, distinguished law professor and activist Lawrence Lessig, the National Science Foundation, and several sovereign Indian reservations, Hughes just might force the FCC to change the way the electromagnetic spectrum is regulated.

  I telephoned Hughes in 2002 and asked him why he started experimenting with wireless. “From the beginning, I’ve looked for ways to make grassroots communications affordable in rural communities,” he answered.51 Community was always central to Hughes’s schemes. As he told Lawrence Lessig, his motivation was “community—not politics, not business, not government—community in all its parts.”52 And the telephone-based business model wouldn’t work for the rural communities that concerned Hughes. “Telephone-based dial-up modem access to the Net is too expensive if you have to dial in from a hundred miles away. I started looking at packet radio as a way to get around these costs,” Hughes recalled in our telephone conversation. As a way around the problem, he found a radio technology called “spread spectrum,” which is used in the industrial, scientific, and medical portion of the spectrum where people can operate without a license— 802.11b territory. He started connecting rural schools with wireless, saving them thousands of dollars per month in “local loop” costs.

  When Hughes told me that the idea of “frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum” radio first occurred to actress Hedy Lamarr while she played four-handed piano, I knew I was in for a tale. Sure enough, Lamarr was born Hedwig Maria Eva Kiesler, an Austrian aristocrat, famous as a teenager for being “the most beautiful girl in the world.”53 She was married to an Austrian arms merchant who did business with the German government prior to World War II. Her husband was so possessive that he forced her to attend his technical meetings with the German military. Unhappy with her marriage and the Nazi regime, Hedwig drugged her maid, escaped to England and then to Hollywood, where she became Hedy Lamarr. One night, while playing four-handed piano with avant garde composer George Antheil, she thought of a way to solve the problem of radio-guided torpedoes.

  Lamarr recalled from her ex-husband’s meetings that the Germans were unable to guide torpedoes with radio signals because the target ship could jam the signals by broadcasting on the same frequency. Lamarr suddenly wondered if there was a way to send a chunk of your signal on one frequency and then hop to a completely different frequency for the next part of the signal. With both the transmitter and the receiver synchronized regarding which frequencies to hop to next—a little like playing four-handed piano—the signal would resist jamming. She thought the transmitter and receiver could be synchronized mechanically, using something like a piano roll. On August 11, 1942, Lamarr and Antheil were awarded U.S. Patent Number 2,292,387 for the Secret Communications System.54 The U.S. Navy tried to make it work, but mechanical controls using paper tape were inadequate. In 1958, the Navy pulled out the old patent and used electronics to synchronize the frequency hopping. By the 1960s, spread-spectrum radio communications of several different kinds, starting with Lamarr and Antheil’s frequency-hopping patent, formed the basis for U.S. military communications.

  The military reserved the right to spread-spectrum applications. GPS satellites, another smart mobenabling technology that originated with the U.S. military, use spread-spectrum (but not frequency-hopping) technology.55 In 1985, the military allowed the FCC to open up spread-spectrum radio manufacturing for use in specific frequency ranges (“bands”). In broader and different bands of frequencies than WiFi is permitted, spread-spectrum radio technology became the basis for many cellular telephone systems. By the end of the 1990s, the necessary equipment grew affordable by hobbyists.

  I remember seeing Hughes and wireless pioneer Dewayne Hendricks at a meeting at Apple Computer in the early 1990s. The meeting was sponsored by Steve Cisler, Apple’s evangelist to libraries and the public service community. Cisler brought together the people from around the world who were trying to combine virtual communities and local civic institutions to create “community networks.” Although community networkers were working with the pre-Web wired Internet and slow modems, Cisler invited Hendricks, who had started a wireless networking company, Tetherless Access, a good ten years before 802.11b opened up wi
reless networking. Hendricks and Hughes were both exploring radio-based means of providing Internet access to remote areas, following some of the work pioneered by amateur radio (“ham”) operators. In 2002, Hendricks reminded me in personal communication that “hams picked up a lot of the DARPA research in survivable packet radio networks and turned it into a device that allowed a radio and computer to be connected in an affordable fashion, enabling amateurs to construct self-routing packet radio networks. Hams were the first to show the value and utility of wireless community networking.”56 Hendricks pointed out in our recent communications that ham radio operators have had a little-publicized global wireless data communication network running for some time—which came into play after the terrorist events of September 11 to support emergency communications in lower Manhattan.

  In 1996, the U.S. State Department and the National Science Foundation, seeking to promote democracy and a good business climate in Mongolia as it emerged from communist rule, heard about Hughes’s experiments with wireless Internet access in rural Colorado and asked him to bring wireless broadband to Ulan Bator. Hughes knew just who to contact—Dewayne Hendricks, who went to Mongolia and networked seven institutions, up to ten kilometers away from the country’s sole Internet feed, in ten days.