Humans Are The Routers

On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy. As we mingled I noticed next to me the small table that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I was inspired by the history around us as we discussed the unfolding history before us. I was sitting in front of Secretary Clinton and when she asked me a question I said, ?Secretary Clinton, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router.? That night seeded some of the ideas that were core to Secretary Clinton?s important Internet Freedoms Speech on January 21, 2010. Fast forward almost exactly one year later to January 25, 2011?a day that shall live in history in the company of dates like July 4, 1776. Egypt?s decision to block the entire Internet and mobile telecommunications network was one of the first salvos in a war of electronic munitions. In this new frontier humans are the routers and armed with new technologies they can never be blocked or silenced again. I was staying up for days sharing and tweeting information as they happened. I had two close personal friends of mine in Egypt who were passing me information when they could. The day Egypt blocked the internet and mobile networks my mind went back to what I had said to Secretary Clinton. The only line of defense against government filtering and blocking their citizens from freely communicating and coordinating via communication networks was to create a new line of communications technologies that governments would find hard to block: Ad hoc wireless mesh networks. I called the idea OpenMesh and tweeted it. Within hours through crowdsourced volunteer efforts the OpenMesh Project was alive complete with domain name, website and forum.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/iyZvXtdxQvc/

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