Clive Thompson, “How to Keep the NSA Out of Your Computer,” Mother Jones, September/October 2013 Issue

Joseph Bonicioli mostly uses the same internet you and I do. He pays a service provider a monthly fee to get him online. But to talk to his friends and neighbors in Athens, Greece, he’s also got something much weirder and more interesting: a private, parallel internet.

He and his fellow Athenians built it. They did so by linking up a set of rooftop wifi antennas to create a “mesh,” a sort of bucket brigade that can pass along data and signals. It’s actually faster than the Net we pay for: Data travels through the mesh at no less than 14 megabits a second, and up to 150 Mbs a second, about 30 times faster than the commercial pipeline I get at home. Bonicioli and the others can send messages, video chat, and trade huge files without ever appearing on the regular internet. And it’s a pretty big group of people: Their Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network has more than 1,000 members, from Athens proper to nearby islands. Anyone can join for free by installing some equipment. “It’s like a whole other web,” Bonicioli told me recently. “It’s our network, but it’s also a playground.” …

The Athenians aren’t alone. Scores of communities worldwide have been building these roll-your-own networks—often because a mesh can also be used as a cheap way to access the regular internet. But along the way people are discovering an intriguing upside: Their new digital spaces are autonomous and relatively safe from outside meddling. In an era when governments and corporations are increasingly tracking our online movements, the user-controlled networks are emerging as an almost subversive concept. “When you run your own network,” Bonicioli explains, “nobody can shut it down.” …

In some ways, a community mesh resembles a food co-op. Its members crunch the numbers and realize that they can solve the last-mile problem themselves at a fraction of the price. In Kansas City, Isaac Wilder, cofounder of the Free Network Foundation, is using this model to wire up neighborhoods where the average household income is barely $10,000 a year. His group partners with community organizations that pay for backbone access. Wilder then sets up a mesh that anyone can join for a modest sum. “The margins on most internet providers are so ridiculously inflated,” he says. “When people see the price they get from the mesh, they’re like, ‘Ten bucks a month? Oh, shit, I’ll pay that!'” …

The last-mile problem, it turns out, isn’t just technical or economic: It’s political and even cultural. To repurpose the famous A.J. Liebling statement, internet freedom is guaranteed only to those who own a connection. “And right now, you and me don’t own the internet—we just rent the capacity to access it from the companies that do own it,” Wilder says. …

Read the full article here.