by Mark Baard
July 19, 2007
from BlastMagazine Website
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 (Rode Island), 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
image),
now works for Civitium, the consulting firm she paid $300,000 to help build
Philly’s Wi-Fi network.
Former Philadelphia CIO Dianah Neff
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 image), when they arrive in a
city. The robots will then scurry off to position themselves, becoming nodes
for a wireless communications network.
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
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.”