The government needs more nodes: Various agencies want to seed cities with wireless networking devices (image from a DOD document).
Despite the high costs and unproven social benefits for municipal broadband, dozens of U.S. cities are ignoring laws banning anti-competitive practices and getting into the internet business.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense is planning to build robots that configure themselves into ad hoc wireless networks within urban areas.
City mayors claim they want to provide free and low-cost Wi-Fi access to the poor and attract business travelers. Defense planners say they need to have broadband capabilities in urban war zones.
But rather than closing the “digital divide” (which many academics admit is being exaggerated), or providing a redundant service to traveling salesmen, it appears that officials aim to seize control of internet communications and track individuals in urban areas.
Military and law enforcement agencies will also use the wireless networks to stage “hard PSYOP” attacks against a brain-chipped populace, according to historian and commentator Alan Watt, who specializes in secret societies and government intelligence operations.
Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, and Providence, R.I. are among the cities partnering with private companies and the federal government to set up public broadband internet access. Providence used Homeland Security funds to construct a network for police, which may be made available to the public at a later date.
None of the cities are expected to turn a profit anytime soon. Nor are the poor likely to benefit from the projects.
Subscribers to Philly’s “Wireless Philadelphia” service, for example, will pay up to 73 percent more than the rate promised to them two years ago.
“(Philadelphia) presented dangerously inaccurate estimates and figures for the costs and revenue” for its wireless network, according to a recent analysis by students at Harvard Law School.
Seeding: The DOD envisions soldiers dropping robots into cities. The robots will self-configure into what are known as “mesh networks.”
City officials have managed to line their own pockets, however.
Philadelphia’s former chief information officer, Dianah Neff (below, left), now works for Civitium, the consulting firm she paid $300,000 to help build Philly’s Wi-Fi network.
Denise Brady, San Francisco’s former deputy CIO, also took a position with Civitium after bringing the firm her city’s business.
San Franciscans might actually lose more than money to their city’s muni Wi-Fi scheme.
Google and Earthlink, the companies building San Francisco’s Wi-Fi network, want to place cameras and sensors atop lampposts at the same time they are installing their Wi-Fi antennae. The companies say they merely want to help police and emergency workers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU have opposed such police/public proposals.
But even if the cities fail to complete their Wi-Fi projects, the military will be able to set up wireless networks within hours, perhaps even faster.
The DOD, which is in the middle of joint urban war-games with Homeland Security and Canadian, Israeli and other international forces, is experimenting with Wi-Fi networks it can set up on the fly.
According to a recent DOD announcement for contractors, soldiers will be able to drop robots, called LANdroids (below, left), when they arrive in a city. The robots will then scurry off to position themselves, becoming nodes for a wireless communications network. (Click here to download a PDF of the DOD announcement.)
The Wi-Fi antennae dotting the urban landscape will serve not only as communications relays, but as transponders that can pinpoint the exact positions of of individual computers and mobile phones–a scenario I described in the Boston Globe last year.
In other words, where GPS loses site of a device (and its owner), Wi-Fi will pick up the trail.
The antennae will also relay orders to the brain-chipped masses, members of the British Ministry of Defense and the DOD believe.
“We already are evolving toward technology implanting,” reads a 1996 Air Force report.
People, already conditioned to receiving biological agents such as flu shots in their bodies, will welcome brain chips that promise to help them control technology, the Air Force report says.
Indeed, Alan Watt believes one of the purposes of muni Wi-Fi and LANdroids will be to disseminate commands and propaganda directly into the human brain.
Tracking and control of information via wireless networks are just the beginning, Watt said. “The implanted chip will be the end goal.”
[parallelnormal.com][davidicke.com]
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