April 2016

In June 2013, reporters at The Washington Post and the Guardian ran a series of stories about the US government’s surveillance programs. According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency was harvesting huge swaths of online traffic — far beyond what had been disclosed — and was working directly with top Internet companies to spy on certain people. Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian journalists who reported the disclosures and a surveillance skeptic, argued in a 2014 TED talk that privacy is a critical feature of open society. People act differently when they know they're being watched. “Essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people,” he said.

The problem, though, is that it's difficult to judge the effect of government-spying programs. How do you collect all the utterances that people stopped themselves from saying? How do you count all the conversations that weren’t had? A new study provides some insight into the repercussions of the Snowden revelations, arguing that they happened so swiftly and were so high-profile that they triggered a measurable shift in the way people used the Internet. Jonathon Penney, a PhD candidate at Oxford, analyzed Wikipedia traffic in the months before and after the NSA’s spying became big news in 2013. Penney found a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned “al-Qaeda,” “car bomb” or “Taliban.” "You want to have informed citizens," Penney said. "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate."

Activists will deliver a petition with over 400,000 signatures to Google’s headquarters asking the company to refrain from sponsoring the Republican National Convention should Donald Trump become the party’s presidential nominee. Progressive groups like ColorOfChange, Credo Action and Free Press Action Fund have been pressuring American corporations not to donate to a Republican convention boosting Trump. The groups will fly a plane over Google’s Mountain View (CA) campus with the message “Google: Don’t be evil. #DumpTrump,” a reference to Google’s famous original corporate motto.

Google was a sponsor of the 2012 Republican convention where the party nominated Mitt Romney. A spokesperson for the company did not respond to a request for comment. Companies are also reportedly becoming wary of the idea of putting their corporate brands next to Trump, who has blazed a path to the nomination by making remarks members of both parties have said are out-of-bounds. The progressive groups say that the companies, should they choose to sponsor the event, would in effect be offering Trump more legitimacy.

Getty Images filed a complaint against Google at the European Commission, accusing the search giant of promoting piracy to solidify its market dominance. The photo service specifically called out Google’s 2013 change to its image search, which allowed users to see high-resolution photos rather than “low res thumbnails” that might encourage users to click through to see a better-quality image. “By creating its own captive, image-rich environment and cutting off user traffic to competing websites — and reserving that traffic exclusively for its own benefit — Google is able to maintain and reinforce its dominance in search,” Getty’s general counsel, Yoko Miyashita, said.

Getty said the 2013 change immediately started diverting traffic away from its own site, which the company said is hurting the livelihood of the 200,000 photographers who use Getty to distribute images. While the complaint was filed with European regulators, Getty said “antitrust authorities around the world should take action.”

Canadians are famously dissatisfied with Internet access in this country, and Mark Iantorno and Benedict Lau, two Toronto developers, are no exception. In December, they met for lunch at a cafeteria in a downtown office, and got to talking about how increasingly frustrated they were—Iantorno with sky-high data plan prices, and Lau, who is a mobile engineer with Android, with “black box design,” or the opacity of consumer tech. At that lunch, they talked about how to bring free, accessible Internet to the city, uncoupled from Canada’s three all-powerful telecoms. They went over various ideas: Iantorno suggested floating Wi-Fi rigged balloons over the city, an idea cribbed from Google’s Project Loon. Lau was skeptical. "I'm doing this thing called mesh networking,” he said. “You should take a look.”

Meshnet networks, or meshnets, are a form of intranet that doesn’t require a central router point. Instead of emitting from a single point, they’re distributed across an entire system of nodes. Accessing one is free—and doesn’t require the services of a telecom. Lau had spent the previous summer chatting with other meshnet enthusiasts in Europe, trying to figure out the best way to set up routers across the city. He suggested it was time to give it a try in Toronto. What grew out of Lau and Iantorno’s meeting, four months ago now, was a plan to build a meshnet in this city—one where users wouldn’t need to worry about eavesdroppers, because it would be encrypted. When it’s finished, Toronto’s first free-to-use meshnet should provide an accessible and secure internet community, maintained by locals keen on becoming digitally self-sufficient. Those early adopters could reshape our relationship to internet providers, and cut monthly rates out of the picture.