(Image: Trevor Snapp/Corbis)

WHEN the Egyptian authorities realised protesters were using the internet to organise themselves in January, they came up with a simple solution: in an instant they disconnected the nation, cutting off anti-government dissidents from an invaluable resource.

The outage inspired James Burke and Chris Pinchen – both members of the P2P Foundation, a group that monitors how data is shared online – to begin work on the ChokePoint Project. The idea is to compile a real-time interactive map of the entire internet and identify potential choke points – the physical and virtual locations where internet access could be easily compromised – and who has the power to strangle them.

ChokePoint Project’s map would allow people to identify the degree and exact location of a network outage, says Burke. So, even if a country’s access to social networks, or the entire internet, is lost, people would have a better chance of circumventing network blockades – either by routeing through open paths, or by using services located abroad, such as Telecomix, which converts messages sent to fax machines into emails.


“With every country in the world sending network data, over time we’ll see the trends of big data patterns,” says Burke, comparing the idea to the patterns observable in financial data.

That’s a way off yet. The project, which began in March, is still in its early stages, though the team was recently awarded a small development grant at the Ars Electronica technology festival.

Burke says care is needed when mapping networks in regimes where the people who supply data could be arrested. As much of the data would be supplied by volunteers, it is crucial that the transfer of data is invisible. The team’s partners are writing software, to be launched later this year, which will both hide data transfer and anonymise its source. All code will be made open source.

Internet blocks became increasingly sophisticated and less easy to detect as the Arab Spring progressed. In Egypt, it was immediately obvious when border gateway protocols (BGP) were turned off. However, when trouble arose in Libya, traffic through the country’s one internet service provider was only slowed down; so the effective outage went under the international radar for a whole day. A real-time map would allow the world to keep track of what is happening in an affected country.

A real-time map would allow the world to keep track of what is happening in an affected country

ChokePoint is not the only website or app designed to help citizens fight back. As well as using standard social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, political activists make use of live audio and video streaming sites, including Audioboo and Bambuser, to keep the world up to date with news from the front line. To help citizens communicate in the thick of it, earlier this year saw the launch of Sukey, a website and app that allows activists to update the location of police during protests.

Armchair activism has not been left behind. A Chilean non-profit organisation, the Intelligent Citizen Foundation, has a series of apps that allow the public to identify possible cases of political corruption, including one that makes it easier to request information that would normally be difficult to get hold of.