Meter maids operate as tax collectors for the state. They “generate” revenue by extorting money from you and yours – “pay this or else…”
Don’t put up with threats. Tell them their actions will not be tolerated or at least not be taken seriously.
Negate the State! :)
In this video Derrick and I (Rapsher) discuss and partake in Robin Hooding. One of our motivating factors is, like most people in the community, we’ve been compromised into paying various fees associated with driving. Robin Hooding is one way we believe we can neutralize our karma for paying a criminal agency. So, we’re not personally getting our money back, but we are preventing others in the community from having their money stolen from them by the city with parking tickets. We encourage you to do this in your city, or just come to Keene NH and join in the fun here.
When I read about the latest wave of demonstrations in London, and saw the word ‘anarchists’ being tossed about in the media, I shrugged.
The general story is interesting to me. I’ve been watching the various demonstrations in the UK, and noting that they’ve been recurring with increasing frequency. It’s pretty clear that the protests have led to an over-reaction by the police, which triggers more demonstration and greater organization on the part of the protesters … well, you see my point. Add the growing call to boycott the British census, and the story-teller in me is curious to see where this is heading.
But I shrugged at the word ‘anarchist’ being (mis)used by the media. The British press loves to dress up their reporting for maximum drama. This results in words such as ‘anarchist,’ and ‘cult’ being over used, and mis-used. It became clear to me a long time ago that what they mean by ‘anarchy,’ and what actual anarchists mean by anarchy are two completely different things.
For example, Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin does a great job of explaining how words like cult get mis-used to the point of rendering the word useless. If the meaning of a word becomes far-too-arbitrary, it’s useless. The same might soon be said of the word anarchist. This is probably a rant best left for another time (and I suspect most readers here already understand where I’m coming from); so let me just say that I tend to call myself a libertarian because ‘anarchist’ is such a loaded word these days.
However, come to find out that the British press did more than mis-use the word ‘anarchist.’ (Hint: serious anarchists aren’t violent, vandalizing hooligans.) They reported that 150 ‘violent anarchists’ were arrested during a massive demonstration in London.
It’s true that 150 people were arrested. However, only a dozen them were arrested for any sort of violence; about 132 of those arrested were peaceful demonstrators. From an article at Bad Science:
You can conflate two different things into one number, either to inflate a problem, or confuse it. Last weekend, a few hundred thousand people marched in London against the cuts. On the same day, there was some violent disturbance, windows smashed, policemen injured, and drunkeness.
The Sun said: “Police have charged nearly 150 people after violent anarchists hijacked the anti-cuts demo and brought terror to London’s streets.” The Guardian republished a Press Association report, headlined: “Cuts protest violence: 149 people charged”. And from the locals, for example, the Manchester Evening News carried “Boy, 17, from Manchester among 149 charged over violence after anti-cuts march”.
In reality, a dozen of these charges related to violence, while 138 are people who were involved in an apparently peaceful occupation of Fortnum and Masons organised by UKUncut, who campaign on tax avoidance.
You will have your own view on whether people should be arrested and charged for standing in a shop as an act of protest. But describing these 150 people as “violent anarchists… who brought terror to London’s streets” is not just misleading: it also makes the police look over 12 times more effective than they really were at charging people who perpetrated acts of violence.
The following is taken from a post I made, and updated, at my blog, Dateline Zero. It began with a few projects that are underway to create a government-less Internet — something I feel is a very noble cause. To have an Internet that is diversified, with power kept close to the people (the users) is something that should, and will happen.
The list of 3 quickly grew to a list of 9 different projects, thanks largely to suggestions from readers. Here’s the article, slightly revised to include all 9 projects:
Klint Finley — who blogs at Technoccult, and writes regularly for ReadWriteWeb — has a great article over at ReadWriteWeb about creating a government-free Internet; the necessity of which is illuminated by recent events in Egypt, which include the government “shutting down the Internet.”
This happened in Egypt on Thursday Jan 27th; at 22:34 UTC the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. The internet intelligence authority Renesys explains it here and confirms that “virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.” This has never happened before in the entire history of the internet, with a nation of this size. A block of this scale is completely unheard of, and Senator Joe Lieberman wants to be able to do the same thing in the US.
Yes this could happen here in the U.S., or in the UK, or in Australia, or anywhere else in the world.
Last year Senators Lieberman and Collins introduced a fairly far-reaching bill that would allow the US Government to shut down civilian access to the internet should a “Cybersecurity Emergency” arise, and keep it offline indefinitely. That version of the bill received some criticism though Liebermancontinued to insist it was important. The bill, now referred to as the ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act’ (PCNAA) has been revised a bit and most notably now removes all judicial oversight. This bill is still currently circulating and will be voted on later this year. Lieberman has said it should be a top priority.
As Sean Bonner observes in a recent post at Boing Boing:
It’s worth noting that the US sends $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt. That makes the US the primary benefactor of the current Egyptian government. Vice President Joe Biden stated in an interview with Jim Lehrer on Thursday that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has held that office since 1981, should not be considered a dictator. His opinion is not shared universally.
Mother Jones has a fantastic play-by-play explaining the situation right now in Egypt, and there are reports that some people using Tor are able to skirt around the governmental blocks.
In other words, most of the U.S. political class seems totally cool with such measures; and supports other government doing the same. Btw, Finley also has an article about Tor being used in Egypt to get around the government blocks.
The Internet Society issued a statement on the Egyptian government’s auto-unplugging: “Cutting off a nation’s access to the Internet only serves to fuel dissent and does not address the underlying causes of dissatisfaction.” Related update on that story today from Wired News: the state shut down the ‘net with a series of phone calls. [Via Boing Boing.]
So what about these 3 projects to create a government-less Internet? Here are the 3 projects mentioned in his article, plus an additional 6 other projects. From Finley’s article:
In Cory Doctorow’s young adult novel Little Brother
, the protagonist starts a wireless ad-hoc network, called X-Net, in response to a government crack-down on civil liberties. The characters use gaming systems with mesh networking equipment built-in to share files, exchange message and make plans.
…Here are a few projects working to create such networks.
Wireless ad-hoc networking has been limited in the past by a bottleneck problem. Researchers may have solved this issue for devices with enough computational power. The U.S. military is also investing in research in this area.
The OLPC’s XO has meshnetworking capabilities. And some gaming systems, such as the Nintendo DS, have mesh networking built in. But we want to look at projects that are specifically aimed at replacing or augmenting the public Internet.
Openet is a part of the open_sailing project. Openet’s goal is to create a civilian Internet outside of the control of governments and corporations. It aims to not only create local mesh networks, but to build a global mesh network of mesh networks stitched together by long range packet radio. See our previous coveragehere.
Netsukuku is a project of the Italian group FreakNet MediaLab. Netsukuku is designed to be a distributed, anonymous mesh network that relies only on normal wireless network cards. FreakNet is even building its own domain name architecture. Unfortunately, there’s no stable release of the code and the web site was last updated in September 2009.
Not to be confused with the mesh networking hardware vendor of the same name, OPENMESH is a forum created by venture captalist Shervin Pishevar for volunteers interested in building mesh networks for people living in conditions where Internet access may be limited or controlled. Pishevar came up with the idea during the protests in Iran in 2009. “The last bastion of the dictatorship is the router,” he told us. The events in Egypt inspired him to get started.
It’s a younger project than Openet and Netsukuku, but it may have more mainstream appeal thanks to being backed by Pishevar. It’s not clear how far along Openet is, and Netsukuku’s seems to be completely stalled so a new project isn’t entirely unreasonable.
Dateline Zero reader Petar brought a “4th project” to my attention, via the comments section; so I wanted to add this into the article right away. His comment:
I’d like to politely point you to a “fourth” project, Tonika, athttp://5ttt.org. This project is new but maturing quickly and it supersedes the aforementioned three projects in both technical as well as econimic/incentive design. Albeit not superbly documented just yet, it is worth keeping an eye on.
The website for that project is www.open-mesh.org, where they explain that B.A.T.M.A.N. is a routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.
Andrew commented:
You should check out B.A.T.M.A.N. (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) and the Babel protocols. Both are mesh-networking protocols that have been successfully implemented on more than 4000 autonomous nodes. They are an improvement on OSLR.
Andrew also says that “every year in Europe there is a BattleMesh meetup where all the people working on mesh networking protocols get together to compare protocols.” Battlemesh sounds like a sweet meetup, and what a great way to stimulate productivity in this area!
Michael K commented:
Moin,
you might also add Freifunk, a mesh network based on OpenWRT, that is up and running in several German cities.
/server irc.fu-berlin.de
/join #freifunkThe chat is in german, but most germans can speak english, also.
ciao,Michael
According to the current Wikipedia entry:
Freifunk.net (German for: “Free radio”) is a non commercial open initiative to support free radio networks in the German region. Freifunk.net is part of the international movement for free and wireless radio networks. For more information on such projects around the world, see wireless community network.
To support the fast deployment of free radio networks, Freifunk uses a specialized firmware for WRT54G devices. With this firmware, it is relatively easy to bring up new wireless mesh networks using ad-hoc WLAN communication and layer 3 routing with OLSR. More information can be found on the firmware’s homepage.
Here’s a semi-related article: List of ad-hoc mesh network routing protocols that can be used during an “internet kill switch”. OPENMESH, Netsukuku, B.A.T.M.A.N., and others are linked up there too. The list they posted is also in response to “recent events in Egypt and the speed of the shutdown. Most of these projects are open to contribution and further development.”
“Daihinia is a commercial project that provides software that essentially turns Windows PCs into wireless repeaters. The company’s software makes it possible to use a desktop or laptop with a normal wireless card to “hop” to a wireless access point while out of range of that access point. There’s no Macintosh version, but it’s being discussed.”
“Digitata is a sub-project of open_sailing’s Openet, which we mentioned in the previous installment. Digitata is focused on bringing wireless networks to rural areas of Africa. The group is creating open source hardware and software, including its own own IP layer for mesh networking called IPvPosition (IPvP).”
“… is a wireless mesh network in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In addition to providing its users with Internet access, it appears to also feature a local network. wlan ljubljana is working with volunteers in other cities in Slovenia to create more local networks, and has created its own firmware package for routers called nodewatcher. Like Freifunk, nodewatcher is based on the embeddable Linux distribution OpenWrt. nodewatcher is designed to be easy to use for a non-technical user.”
For more information, check out Finley’s 2nd article at ReadWriteWeb; and it includes a great list of resources. Also, I learned quite a bit just by reading the comments to a posting of the ReadWriteWeb article over at Hacker News. Some great points are brought up there, and responded to by others. So after you read Finley’s article and find yourself wanting to know more (like me); read the great comments after the article and then head over to that discussion at Hacker News.
For example, while reading it I wondered if Freenet could have a role to play in a Government-less Internet. Someone brought that up in the comments at RRW; to which Roch replied: “The freenet is a way to hide/encrypt/distribute data anonymously but it still needs the “governmental” internet to connect peers together.”
I have a feeling that with recent events in places like Iran, and current events in Egypt, a decentralized Internet is going to be in huge demand. Especially if the government of bigger countries, like the U.S., get their ‘off-switch.’ Such projects will prove to be invaluable to freedom of speech, freedom of commerce, and in emergencies such as natural disasters as well.
Many of us, dissatisfied with the direction that Bureaucrash has taken, are busily working behind-the-scenes to build the kind of organization that Bureaucrash should be.
As the Neo-Bureaucrashers photocopy thousands of form letters to send to their congresspersons; this new organization will be a voice for effective, principled activism.
What’s the name of Bureaucrash’s successor? You decide. Head on over to After Bureaucrash Action and suggest a name. Name suggestions will be taken through midnight (EST) Tuesday. Once the submissions are in a vote will be held and the new organization will be off and running.
Well, not exactly president but Executive Director/Crasher-in-Chief of Bureaucrash.
As some of y’all may know, both Jason and I formerly worked at Bureaucrash in this capacity. Since my departure on April 1st to pursue Motorhome Diaries a number of friends and movement acquaintances have contacted me asking my thoughts about them applying for the position.
I’ve been straight-up with these folks, both about the nature of the job and in sharing my opinion on whether they’d be a good fit. And though I don’t claim to know of all of those that’ve applied for the gig, I believe that I have a good idea of some of the front-runners — one of whom is Xaq Fixx, whom both Jason and I are throwing our support behind for the following reasons:
I’m not sure if this post will have any influence on those at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (of which Bureaucrash became a project of a few years ago) as they review applications, but I wanted to voice my support for Xaq as he is my friend and because I believe that he has the skill-set necessary to head Bureaucrash.
If you too agree, then why not let those at CEI know by emailing Cord Blomquist, who is overseeing the application-review process: cblomquist[at]cei[dot]org.
Best of luck buddy!
| # | Member | Score |
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| 1. |  Hanarchist |
2 |
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2 |
| 3. |  TalleyTV |
2 |
| 4. |  kellyjames |
2 |
| 5. |  nicoladoula |
1 |
| 6. |  mmggw432 |
1 |
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