Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices – Page 42

2011/02/182011/02/21

Internet Freedom–The Public Dialog Continues

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Internet, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), International Aid, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Mobile, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

SOURCE: P2P Foundation Category:P2P Infrastructure

This is a specialization of our general Technology section, focusing more explicitely on the ‘true internet' or distributed P2P infrastructures. It is being updated over the next week or so.

On the overall perspective of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do, a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world

Help us improve our definition of what a true P2P Infrastructure should be: Defining True P2P Infrastructures

Programmatic Statement for the creation of a world-wide user-controlled network based on a distributed architecture, by Raffael Kéménczy

Projects we find worthty of support:

We Rebuild is a cluster of net activists who have joined forces to collaborate on issues concerning access to a free internet without intrusive surveillance
Open Source Mesh Networking projects monitored by Open Source Mesh
Various strategies to achieve Free Fiber to the home
High Priority Free Software Projects: “The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects that are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software and free software operating systems.”

Projects to decentralize/distribute the internet:

Continue reading “Internet Freedom–The Public Dialog Continues”

2011/02/172011/02/17

Obama in a Strategic & Intellectual Vacuum

02 Diplomacy, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Officers Call, Strategy

No intelligence, no strategy, no nothing. For this we pay taxes?

In U.S. Signals to Egypt, Obama Straddled a Rift (NYT)

Summary: State still loves dictators, has no idea what is going on with the young and the restless. Intelligence is no where to be found. Bottom line is that the President, who appears to have had the right instincts, is being undermined by a government that can only be considered to be uninformed and incoherent.

Phi Beta Iota: From David Abshire to Jim Locher to Tony Zinni and Robert Steele, we have long known of the strategic vacuum surrounding the President. You cannot be an effective President (theatrics aside) without getting a grip on reality, having a Strategic Analytic Model, and demanding Whole of Government harmonization deeply rooted in 360 degree multi-cultural intelligence. None of that exists today within the US Government.

See Also:

Intelligence for the President–AND Everyone Else, as published in CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, February 27 – 1 March 2009

Fixing the White House and National Intelligence, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Spring 2010; As published:

Human Intelligence (HUMINT): All Humans, All Minds, All the Time (US Army Strategic Studies Institute, June 2010

Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020

Review: The Battle for Peace–A Frontline Vision of America’s Power and Purpose (Hardcover)

Review: Preventing World War III–A Realistic Grand Strategy

2011/02/162011/04/11

Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t …

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Mobile, Real Time, Technologies

Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

Jim Dwyer

The New York Times, February 15, 2011

On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.

The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”

. . . . . . .

Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.

. . . . . . .

Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

Read rest of article….

Continue reading “Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t …”

2011/02/162011/02/21

An App for Dissidents–And Why It’s Harmful

Autonomous Internet, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Mobile

COMMUNICATIONS

An App for Dissidents

A startup is offering free encrypted voice and text communications to protesters in Egypt.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2011 BY ROBERT LEMOS

MIT Technology Review

Two new applications for Android devices, called RedPhone and TextSecure, were released last week by Whisper Systems, a startup created by security researchers Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson. The apps are offered free of charge to users in Egypt, where protesters opposing ex-president Hosni Mubarak have clashed with police for weeks. The apps use end-to-end encryption and a private proxy server to obfuscate who is communicating with whom, and to secure the contents of messages or phone conversations. “We literally have been working night and day for the last two weeks to get an international server infrastructure set up,” says Anderson.

Anderson and Marlinspike are working with several nongovernmental organizations, such as MobileActive, to create a product that will be of use to other protesters. Of course, the software would not have helped when the Egyptian government took the unprecedented step of effectively shutting down both Internet and cellular communications across the entire country at the end of January.

Read rest of article….

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2011/02/142011/10/22

Good People, Bad System

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, InfoOps (IO), Reform

Obama Isn't Trying to ‘Weaken America'

Some conservatives call the president the political equivalent of a suicide bomber: so consumed with hatred that he's willing to blow himself up in order to inflict casualties on a society he loathes.

. . . . . . .

In short, the White House record of more than 200 years shows plenty of bad decisions but no bad men. For all their foibles, every president attempted to rise to the challenges of leadership and never displayed disloyal or treasonous intent.

. . . . . . .

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: Both the extreme right and the extreme left persist in demonizing individuals while remaining oblivious to the fact that it is the two-party “system” (remember, there are 65 parties in America, 63 of them disenfranchised) that has with malice and deliberation “sold out” the US public. The fact is that top-down governance is impossible anyway, it is pathologically dangerous when done by corrupt uninformed parties. The ONLY thing that can get America back on track is Electoral Reform–yet to our astonishment, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Cynthia Mckinney, all others who would seem to have everything to gain by coming together and demanding Electoral Reform in time for 2012, remain silent. Could they be part of the theater? The ONLY agile governance in the age of complexity is collective self-governance rich in clarity, diversity, and integrity. Electoral Reform is the only way to get there.

2011/02/142011/04/11

CONNECT First, the Collective Intelligence Will Happen Naturally

Advanced Cyber/IO, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Internet, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Historic Contributions, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Mobile, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Tools

An Idea Worth Spreading: The Future is Networks

Venessa Miemis. March 16 2010

Emergent by Design

This weekend I experienced a snowcrash; a moment where the seemingly disparate pieces of information floating in my head came together. A synapse fired, a new connection was made, and I was brought to a new level of consciousness, a new way of seeing the world. In reading this over, it almost sounds obvious, but it took me a while to get here. I hope that by sharing with you, it’ll help you “get it” too. So let me take you on my thinking trail.

Read every single word….

16+ Projects & Initiatives Building Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks

A Metathinking Manifesto [Who's the Architect?]

Continue reading “CONNECT First, the Collective Intelligence Will Happen Naturally”

2011/02/132011/10/22

EGYPT: Can Democracy by Randomly Revolutionized?

08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence, Reform

Will Egypt Revolutionize Democracy Itself?

by Tom Atlee

Thomas Friedman suggests that the special strength of Egypt's youth-led revolutionary movement has been “the fact that it represented every political strain, every segment and class in Egyptian society.” But then he turns around and says that diversity “is also its weakness. It still has no accepted political platform or leadership.”

Of course, from a majoritarian electoral perspective, he's right. But perspective that may not provide the most potent and useful democratic approaches for Egypt's future — or ours.

If Egypt's 21st century revolutionaries want their revolution to turn the world, they will make this supposed weakness — their inclusive diversity — into the greatest strength of their emergent democracy. They will cherish, develop and institutionalize their cross-section diversity AS a political platform AND AS the principle underlying their new forms of democratic leadership.

My advice: Make random selection as fundamental to Egyptian democracy as majority vote will be. Properly institutionalized, random selection is harder to manipulate and co-opt than elections.
Continue reading “EGYPT: Can Democracy by Randomly Revolutionized?”