Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom

“Hillary Clinton called for the U.S. to promote Internet
freedoms earlier this week and introduced a $25 million fund for
technology companies that might help with the task. The New America
Foundation has already applied for a grant under the program, which
includes a $3.5 million proposal, of which $500,000 will be funded
by the New America Foundation itself. The mission? To build the
technology stack for a distributed, open-source telecommunications
system.

“The project would combine well-known projects — such as
the open source voice projects Asterisk and OpenBTS – with
new projects for mesh networking known as The Serval Project
— which Kevin covered earlier this month — and
Commotion, open-source firmware to enable routers to create an open
mesh network. Dan Meredith, a technologist at New America, broke it
down for me, and said the hope is to deliver communications in
areas where Internet access is scarce, but also among populations
unable to use communications because of government
interference.”

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