Communications of the ACM
Online Freedom: An App For That Is Coming
Credit: ChewOnTech.com
The U.S. government and the New America Foundation are developing the Commotion Wireless project, which aims to promote free expression online and takes advantage of the fact that more people are using mobile devices.
The system is useful for people to communicate in situations when governments do not want them to, according to New American Foundation project leader Sascha Meinrath.
Commotion Wireless is designed as “a secure and reliable platform to ensure [dissidents'] communications cannot be controlled or cut off by authoritarian regimes,” according to the project’s mission statement. Each user in the system becomes a node, making it much more difficult to shut down compared to a system with a centralized access point.
Commotion Wireless is one of several projects being funded by the U.S. State Department to promote online freedom. The United States has provided about $76 million over the past for years for Commotion Wireless and other programs geared toward online freedom.
The State Department is supporting a dozen different circumvention technologies, including a panic button app for mobile phones, a slingshot program designed to identify censored content, and training programs to help activists in repressive areas keep operating, says assistant U.S. Secretary of State Michael Posner.
From Agence France-Presse
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